San Jose-based Maxtor Corp, the disk drive company that made a name for itself by always being the capacity market leader in the 5.25 Winchester world, has been falling seriously behind in the 3.5 generation, but reckons it has reclaimed its crown with a drive that stores 1.24Gb formatted (rival 1.2Gb drives from the likes of Seagate Technology Inc are unformatted capacities). It is also very fast, with an 8.5mS seek time, leading Maxtor to claim the industry’s highest performance as well as the highest capacity in the 3.5 world. The MXT-1240 comes in AT bus and SCSI-2 versions and has a read-write channel that is claimed to be unique, which supports data transfer rates of up to 44Mbps because the platters spin at a new high speed of 6,200 rpm, reducing average rotational latency to 4.76mS, the lowest of any disk drive on the market, it is claimed. The SCSI-2 interface supports transfer rates of 10M-bytes per second and performance features such as command queuing, anticipatory reads and buffering of sequential write commands. A segmented 256Kb data buffer with cacheing algorithms is also included. Despite all the enhancements, the drive uses Maxtor’s field-proven 3.5 LXT head-disk assembly. Evaluation units of the SCSI-2 interface version are available now with OEM production scheduled for next quarter Evaluation units for the AT interface version will be available in the second quarter 1992 with production set for third quarter. OEM evaluation unit pricing for either is $1,800.
