Maxtor Corporation announced its new high-capacity, native Serial ATA MaXLine III hard drives. The new storage products from the company deliver previously unavailable capabilities and are targeted at enterprise market.

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 backup.

Maxtor MaxCommand technology encompasses Maxtor’s unique firmware, integrated SATA technology, 16MB buffer and exclusive dual processor for intelligent and efficient managing of the drive’s workload.

The MaXLine III drive’s new Serial ATA 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.

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.