Maxtor Corporation announced its new high-capacity, native SATA MaXLine III hard drives. The third-generation MaXLine drives feature the industry's first 16MB buffer and are designed to the enterprise standard of 1 million hour mean time to failure (MTTF).

With new SATA II features including native command queuing (NCQ), capacity up to 300GB, 7200 RPM speed and Maxtor® MaxCommand™ technology, the drives are ideally suited to provide cost-effective storage for midline and nearline applications, such as fixed-content storage and disk-to-disk back up.

Maxtor MaxCommand technology encompasses Maxtor's unique firmware, integrated SATA technology, 16MB buffer and exclusive dual processor for intelligently and efficiently managing the drive's workload.

"Applications that require SATA hard drives in the enterprise are growing as corporations need to deal with a myriad of regulations that require that data be kept longer for compliance purposes," said Brian Garrett at the Enterprise Storage Group. "Maxtor's MaXLine III drives combine capacity, performance and cost efficiency to meet the requirements of these midline applications. The drive's SATA II feature set with native command queuing allows applications to do more in parallel for increased performance."

The MaXLine III drive's new SATA II features bring new performance and flexibility to network storage environments. These features are an extension of the SATA 1.0 specification and include: NCQ, staggered spin up, hot-plug and, asynchronous signal recovery. NCQ significantly enhances the drive's performance, enabling multi-threaded performance and allowing the drive to reorder and efficiently execute up to 32 commands for greater data throughput and maximum system performance.

MaXLine III drives also feature hot-plug functionality, providing customers using RAID or other large storage arrays with better serviceability and flexibility when a SATA drive needs to be added or upgraded while the system is running. Reliability improvements include staggered spin up, which minimizes the power surge when a subsystem powers up.

"Advances in SATA technology and our manufacturing processes allow us to provide customers with additional value in our MaXLine family of premium SATA hard drives," said Mike Williams, vice president of product marketing at Maxtor. "Designed specifically for enterprise applications, Maxtor MaXLine drives continue to be the brand of choice for midline and nearline applications, meeting the capacity and cost requirements of our customers."

Because SATA hard drives can be implemented in a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) architecture, MaXLine drives will be able to be integrated with SAS drives in a single SAS system. This Serial in a Box™ storage architecture provides flexibility and scalability in one enclosure that can serve as a universal building block for constructing a data center's storage infrastructure. High-capacity MaXLine drives can be used for applications requiring the maximum capacity at the best cost and installed together with performance-oriented SAS drives for high transactional performance, allowing customers to maximize their total cost of ownership.

Maxtor's MaXLine III drives feature a three-platter design, offering capacities of 250GB and 300GB. SATA models are currently available for qualification testing and will begin shipping in volume next quarter. Availability of ATA/133 models will follow. MaXLine III drives include a three-year limited warranty.