San Jose, California-based Maxtor Corp’s claim to fame always used to be that it was first to the highest capacities in the disk drive world, and the company seems to have recovered its prowess after a lengthy spell on the sidelines. The company has announced a new Laramie 2.5 disk family that comes in capacities of 1.34Gb, 1.0Gb and 837Mb, and claims they are the highest capacity low-profile 12.5mm 2.5 drives announced to date. Up to now, if you wanted 1.35Gb, you had to put up with a drive 19mm thick. The electronics of the Laramie drives is the signal processor-based architecture pioneered in Maxtor’s 1.8 MobileMax drives – the technique enables a single processor to manage all drive functions and reduce overall chip count. The drive has four platters, and also uses patented disk clamping technology borrowed from MobileMax drives and power consumption is as low as 30mW in sleep mode. Proximity recording, in which the head fly height is dramatically reduced to improve signal-to-noise ratio, is borrowed from the 3.5 Durangos. OEM evaluation unit prices are $849 for the 1.34Gb drive, $695 for the 1.0Gb drive and $595 for the 837Mb drive. Volume is next quarter.
