Maxtor's Atlas Supports Ultra320 SCSI

The product supports the industry's most advanced interface, Ultra320 SCSI, taking drive performance and reliability to the next level. The drive offers the bus bandwidth capable of supporting data-hungry applications such as video streaming, audio editing, desktop publishing and dynamic media.

"The Maxtor Atlas 10K III U320 drive offers us a significant performance advantage over any other drive in the industry," said John Dooley, vice president of sales and marketing at RAID, a storage expert in Lawrence, Mass. "In addition, Maxtor's Adaptive Active Filtering feature optimizes signal integrity, resulting in improved bandwidth and sustained data-transfer rates."

The Atlas 10K III drives support capacities of 18.4 Gbytes, 36.7 Gbytes and 73.4 Gbytes, a 10,000-rpm rotational speed, a 4.5-millisecond seek time, and up to 622-Mbps internal transfer rate. The drives are one-inch tall. Their size and capacity make them a reasonable option for solutions centered on clustering, for example.

Using Iometer, an 11-stage script that reads and writes data to a storage device, CRN Test Center engineers found that the Maxtor drive performed slightly slower on a 320-Mbyte bus when compared with other premier SCSI drives under Microsoft Windows XP.

In a single drive comparison with Seagate 15K drives, there was a performance difference of about 68 percent where data became more random and the blocks of data became smaller. CRN engineers would have been able to overlook the performance numbers if it was around 50 percent due to the higher RPMs of the Seagate drive but a 68 percent difference shows that there are other bottlenecks within the drive.

Maxtor has taken steps to prevent and diagnose hard-drive failures by including SMART compliance features, which allow a user to assess what is wrong with a drive in the event of a failure. Software that resides on the hard drive monitors the internal performance of the drive's motors, media, heads and electronics, while the host software monitors the drive's overall reliability.

The Atlas 10K III comes with a five-year warranty.