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A Faster Hard Drive Highway

Today's hard drives access data faster than ever, but all that speed is useless if the data gets caught in a bottleneck between the drive and the rest of the PC. To let computers take full advantage of hard drives' zippier speeds, Maxtor recently unveiled its new Ultra Advanced Technology Attachment/133 standard.

The new standard builds on the existing Ultra ATA/100 interface but offers a faster transfer rate of 133 megabytes per second (33 percent more than the current standard). Best of all, the new standard is completely compatible with existing ATA standards--you can even use the same cable.

Future Timing

The first PCI cards for PCs featuring the new Ultra ATA/133 standard should hit the market later this year, and new drives won't be far behind. The standard is unlikely to make its way into chip sets and system motherboards until next year.

While Maxtor is pushing its new standard (it licenses the technology to others for free), the company continues to stand behind the development of Serial ATA, the next big step forward in hard drive interfaces. Development issues have slowed the progress of Serial ATA, however.

The Ultra ATA/133 interface is an evolutionary step, but the Serial ATA interface--with transfer rates starting at 150 MBps--is a revolutionary one. Unfortunately, the Serial ATA interface likely won't reach PCs until at least 2003.

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