Maxtor Corporation unveiled this week its new series of QuickView external hard disk drives designed for consumer electronics products, such as DVRs. Originally the company supplied its QuickView only to makers of consumer electronics devices, but recently decided to address end-users with its external product as well.

The new QuickView Expander offering leverages the core technology of Maxtor QuickView consumer electronics (CE) hard drives, which power over 80% of today’s DVRs worldwide, according to Maxtor. The QuickView CE drives are designed for consumer applications and offer high performance and advanced features, such as Thermal Control, Durability, Acoustic Management, A/V Streaming and Error Recovery. Maxtor QuickView drives have been a core component of the company’s consumer product mix for many years and are recognized by our global OEMs as the preferred drive for consumer electronics devices.

The internal QuickView HDDs are available in 40GB, 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250GB and 300GB flavours and use Parallel ATA-133 bus. Performance of such devices with 5400rpm motors and 2MB cache is more than enough for DVRs, but may be considered as low for personal computers.

There are no precise details about QuickView Expander HDD at this point. Typically external hard disk drives are plugged-in using USB 2.0, FireWire or External Serial ATA ports.

The QuickView Expander product will be available for shipping in early Q3 2004.