Features - Storage Innovations:

MAXTOR DEMONSTRATES SINGLE-CHIP NATIVE SATA DRIVES AT IDF

Maxtor Corp, a worldwide leader in hard disk drives and consumer storage products, announced that it is showcasing its single-chip, native Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives with Intel at IDF in San Francisco. In two separate demonstrations, Maxtor and Intel will illustrate how Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and Hot Plug capabilities offer flexibility and increased performance for systems such as high-end PCs, RAID, entry-level servers, and mid-line and near-line storage solutions.

The NCQ demonstration, in booth 649, is the first public showing of native SATA drives on Intel's next-generation chipset, codenamed Grantsdale. As part of the extensions to the SATA 1.0 specification, NCQ is the most significant hard drive performance enhancement created to date. This feature allows the Maxtor native SATA hard drive to reorder and efficiently execute up to 32 commands for greater data throughput and maximum system performance. The NCQenabled demo system shows significant performance increases over the non-NCQ enabled system including better throughput with random I/Os and faster file copy operations.

Maxtor's SATA hard drives will also be referenced by Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group, in his keynote titled "Digital Home Advances." The keynote will showcase the next generation chipset, Grantsdale, and its capability to support Hot Plug with Intel RAID technology using native SATA drives, such as those produced by Maxtor. Hot Plug provides customers, using RAID or other large storage arrays, with better serviceability and flexibility when a SATA drive needs to be added, upgraded or replaced while the system is running. This is increasingly important in today's 24x7 environments, as Hot Plugability means virtually no downtime for the customer.

"Native Command Queuing provides Serial ATA with multi-threaded performance features that were previously only available with higher-end storage interfaces," said Knut Grimsrud, Serial ATA Working Group chairman and Intel senior principal engineer. "The NCQ performance gains and Hot Plug capabilities demonstrated by Maxtor's native Serial ATA disk drives highlight the compelling new value Serial ATA storage solutions bring to customers."

"Today, OEMs and system builders rely on Maxtor and Intel to provide leading-edge products for building their storage solutions," said Stacey Lund, executive director for Maxtor's Client Computing Group. "We continue to work closely with Intel on the compatibility of our next generation, native SATA hard drives. Our goal is to deliver highest SATA performance, capacity and durability to our customers."

Maxtor's first-generation 7200 RPM SATA drives feature the fastest performance in their class and the highest capacity available on a SATA drive today. NCQ, Hot Plug and other SATA II features will be included in Maxtor's next-generation SATA hard drives, which will be available in volume later this year.