THE DIVISION OF HITACHI that took over IBM's hard drive division said it has released a 250GB Serial ATA unit today. The 3.5-inch Deskstar 7K250 uses 80GB+ platters combined to create 250GB, that's a quarter of a terabyte, of storage. The 7200 rev per minute hard drive is aimed at desktop PCs but is also targeted at "near line" storage, backup, games and other apps.Hitachi will also offer the disk drive with a non Serial ATA interface, and claims that when S-ATA is used, it will fly 150MBps across the wires. The drive will also be available in 40, 80 and 160GB versions. Pricing details are not yet available, although Hitachi says units will be for sale by the end of this month.

Serial ATA drives have been a little slow in arriving, although Seagate set the trend by getting product out very early indeed. Hitachi is on the Serial ATA committee and the Serial ATA-II committee, but quite possibly has been delayed by its acquisition of IBM's hard drive division.

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10173

Cool, what the heck is Serial ATA anyways? Sounds old, but I know it's new....:huh:

If these drives are of the quality(!) of their Deskstar (Deathstar) drives, forget it. Stick with Maxtor or WD, Seagate for SCSI.

I always thought that Maxtor was a great brand, but that was only until recently. The last hard drive that I got from them wouldn't work with their PowerMax utility. I knew the hard drive wasn't working, so I called their customer service, and they told me to run PowerMax. I told them it didn't work, and they told me that the customers are required to run the program in order to diagnose the problem. It was very strange, and they didn't help me.