Maxtor ships next-generation Diamondmax hard drives

Mumbai: Maxtor Corporation (NYSE: MXO), a global major in hard disk drives and consumer storage products, has announced that it is shipping its new Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drives to OEMs and channel partners around the world. Based on an integrated, single-chip native SATA solution, the new DiamondMax 10 drives feature native command queuing (NCQ), the company's proprietary dual-processor technology, and a new 16MB buffer. These features, coupled with Maxtor''s latest firmware technology, allows the drive to self-balance system workloads, which helps consumers run multiple applications at the same time, such as games and music, without overwhelming their PC systems.

"Intel is excited to be working with hard drive vendors such as Maxtor to bring native command- queuing technology to the desktop market," says Sunil Kumar, Intel's director of chipset and software marketing. "When our new Intel 915G/P or the 925X Express chipsets with Intel Matrix Storage Technology are combined with NCQ-enabled drives like Maxtor's DiamondMax 10, users experience faster boot times, file transfers and game level loads."

Designed for multimedia PC users, graphic artists, system integrators and white-box builders, the new 7200-RPM DiamondMax 10 drives are offered in capacities of up to 300GB. The drive also provides best-in-class performance for a 7200-RPM SATA drive.

"We continue to meet our customers' needs with reliable and cost-effective storage solutions — whether it's our new DiamondMax 10 drives for desktop use, or our recently announced new MaXLine III drives for midline and nearline enterprise applications, says Yogesh Kamat, Maxtor sales manager for India. "We have received positive responses from customers and channel partners around the world, which is a testament to their confidence in our ability to deliver products that blend value, innovative storage technology and reliability."