Maxtor Corp. on Monday announced a pair of Serial ATA hard drives, increasing capacities to 300MB while offering native command queuing and a significantly larger 16MB buffer.
The new 7,200-rpm drives point to a new axis for improvement in hard drives: throughput. Both the additional buffer size and the NCQ technologies are designed to move data efficiently through the hard drive, from the disk platter to the host PC.
A 300GB drive is nothing new for Maxtor; the company already ships an external OneTouch 300GB model and a DiamondMax Plus 5,400-rpm 300GB drive. The new 250GB and 300GB models fit within Maxtors DiamondMax 10 family, designed for speed.
“We continue to meet our customers needs with reliable and cost-effective storage solutions ─ whether its our new DiamondMax 10 drives for desktop use, or our recently announced new MaXLine III drives for midline and nearline enterprise applications,” said Stacey Lund, executive director of marketing at Maxtor, in a statement.
The new drives boast a range of enhancements. The larger buffer means that more data will be able to be stored in faster RAM memory, smoothing the streaming of data to and from the disk.
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