Maxtor Corp. announced that its new lineup of desktop- and enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs) would support Serial ATA-300 interconnection as well as an array of new capabilities later during the quarter. The announcement means that Maxtor’s HDDs will offer similar functionality as products from competing Seagate and Hitachi GST.

“Maxtor is adding the new 3Gb/s SATA interface to its product line, equipping the drives for next-generation storage arrays and desktop computers. The 3Gb/s SATA interface combined with SATA II features is designed to provide users with enhanced performance, connectivity, data availability and storage management capabilities,” said Gary Gentry, senior vice president, worldwide marketing at Maxtor.

The new hard drives with Serial ATA-300 support are Maxtor MaXLine III and DiamondMax 10 products that will be available before the end of the year.

Maxtor MaXLine III HDDs will be available in 250GB and 300GB capacities. The new storage devices will use 7200rpm motor, incorporate 16MB cache and will support native command queuing (NCQ) technology in addition to other Serial ATA-II capabilities, such as hot plug, staggered spin-up and asynchronous recovery. The manufacturer proclaims 9.0ms read seek time and 4.17ms average latency for its MaXLine III products.

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 also features 16MB cache, 7200rpm motor, 250GB and 300GB capacities. The maker said that average seek time is less than 9ms, whereas average latency is 4.17ms. The HDD features NCQ functionality.

The hard drive industry is continuing its transition from the traditional Parallel ATA to the Serial ATA (SATA) interface. According to IDC, 65% of the worldwide desktop PC market will feature the SATA interface by the end of this year. Many PC and storage subsystem manufacturers are expected to deploy 3.0Gb/s SATA products in 2006 to take advantage of the increased interface speed and a richer feature-set.

Interoperability between Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 3Gb/s SATA make the Maxtor MaXLine enterprise ATA family a good complement to Maxtor Atlas SAS drives announced earlier this year.