Maxtor Ships 250-GByte Drive

Maxtor Ships 250-GByte Desktop Drive

And Discusses Serial ATA Plans, Too

By Mark Hachman


Maxtor Corp. announced that it is shipping the world's largest ATA desktop drive, a 250-Gbyte whopper that includes an ATA-133 interface.

Maxtor's new drive ships as part of a kit which includes an ATA-133 cable and add-on card which fools the host PC's operating system into thinking it's communicating with a SCSI drive, thus neatly sidestepping any logical addressing barriers, said Paul Streit, a senior product marketing manager with the company.


The $399.95 250-Gbyte hard drive kit is available at nationwide retailers, Maxtor said.


Maxtor also said that ASACA Corporation, a 30-year-old high-density storage solutions leader, has qualified and exclusively chosen Maxtor's MaXLine Serial ATA (SATA) drives for its new FireFly DM series digital virtual library.


The announcement is slightly problematic, given that Maxtor hasn't officially announced its Serial ATA plans yet. "Yes, we're walking a very fine line here, as it hasn't been announced and isn't shipping," said Scott Stetzer, senior technical marketing manager for Maxtor. But Maxtor will be announcing the product "very quickly", Stetzer said.



Seagate Technology is rumored to have delayed its Barracuda V Serial ATA drives until December, according to one reseller source. Seagate officials did not respond to repeated phone calls for comment late last week.