Features - Storage Innovations:

MAXTOR QUALIFIFYING NEWEST SCSI DRIVES AT MAJOR OEMs

Maxtor Corp announced it is currently qualifying its newest generation of enterprise hard disk drives, the Maxtor Atlas 10K V and Atlas 15K II Ultra320 SCSI hard disk drives, at major global OEMs. As the first 3.5-inch form factor hard drives designed to achieve a 1.4 million hour MTTF (mean time to failure) rating, these drives offer a valuable combination of reliability, ease of integration and enhanced intelligence. The Atlas 10K V drive features an areal density of 73.5GB per platter and the Atlas 15K II drive features an areal density of 36.7GB per platter. Both drives include new MaxAdapt adaptive features and increased capacity points.

Maxtor Atlas drives are the only enterprise hard disk drives in the market equipped with MaxAdapt intelligent technology. The MaxAdapt features enable the Atlas 10K V and Atlas 15K II drives to adjust to a myriad of system designs and conditions for ease of integration. MaxAdapt features include Maxtor's third-generation Adaptive Active Filtration and three new features: Adaptive Bias Estimation, Rotational Vibration Compensation and Virtual Cache Lines. This unique feature set monitors and adjusts to varying system conditions such as temperature, workloads, rotational vibration and electrical noise to optimize the system's sequential and random performance.

"As one of the key enterprise hard drive suppliers to major global OEMs, we work closely with our customers to provide them a product with the performance, reliability and capacity that they require," said Mike Wingert, executive vice president and general manager of Maxtor's Server Products Group. "We also leverage our expertise and enterprise storage experience in providing customers with design support and compatibility testing to help them bring their products to market."

The Atlas 10K V drive features capacities of 73, 147 and 300GB, and a 10,000 RPM rotational speed. The drive offers a maximum sustained transfer rate of 89MB per second and average seek times as fast as 4.0ms, a 24 percent sequential performance improvement and 7 percent average seek time improvement over the previous generation of Atlas 10K drives.

The Atlas 15K II drive features capacities of 36, 73 and 147GB, and a 15,000 RPM rotational speed. The drive offers a maximum sustained transfer rate of 98MB per second and average seek times as fast as 3.0ms, a 31 percent sequential performance improvement and 7 percent seek time improvement over the previous generation Atlas 15K drives. Both the Atlas 10K V drive and Atlas 15K II drive include an 8MB cache buffer.

Through its MaxLabs services, Maxtor provides specialized testing and integration services to further assist customers in specific hard drive design and development requirements for enterprise environments. MaxLabs services also include comprehensive compatibility testing of Atlas drives with a wide variety of systems, controller cards and the latest operating systems, BIOS and drivers.

Maxtor Atlas 10K V and Atlas 15K II drives are being manufactured in Maxtor's Singapore facility.