Hitachi's 7K400 Hard Drive Capacity Reaches 400 GB, Maxtor's MaXLine III Advances Serial ATA

Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0

The New MaXLine III primarily caters to the Near-Line segment. Specifically, it targets medium to larger amounts of data that users don't have to access often, for example, backup images from corporate PCs or vast databases that act as resources for employees. Alternatively, though, such a drive can also be used to install a home media server that records audio and video files. Maxtor offers two models here with 250 and 300 GB storage capacity, respectively, which is certainly enough for your average data archive. However, MaXLine III's unique feature is its native Serial ATA interface, which can also handle Command Queuing. Apart from the Barracuda 7200.7, it is now just the second drive offering this feature (even though it wasn't scheduled until the release of Serial ATA II). Since the MaXLine III we got was a model from the previous series, the benchmark results have to be taken with a grain of salt, at least in part. We assume that the data transfer rates won't change when the new version is released, while all I/O-laden applications will gain in performance. As a result, we omitted results from the application benchmark Winbench 99 2.0: they do not reflect our experience with the drive. Another factor here is that we will switch our test system in the upcoming weeks, enabling support for command queuing. In doubt, MaXLine III will only live up to its potential once it has an up-to-date controller.