Many top PC manufacturers are expanding the use of 7200 RPM drives across all platforms and market segments. The performance achieved by 7200 RPM IDE drives also have made these drives a viable alternative to SCSI in traditional SCSI applications such as server and entry-level RAID. According to analysts at IDC, total worldwide shipments of 7200 RPM IDE drives is expected to be 16% of all IDE drives by the end of this year. This number is expected to be approximately 75% by the year 2002. The newly introduced DiamondMax ® Plus 40 hard drives feature a 7200 RPM rotational speed along with other performance-enhancing features that generate faster overall system response times and performance. A Viable Alternative to SCSI,IDE 7200 RPM drives have made their way into the storage-intensive environment of graphic and video applications. The ability to achieve fast-sustained throughput is essential in high-end graphics and digital video content creation. 7200 RPM drives establish a new price/performance ratio in the professional graphic and digital video marketplace when compared to the SCSI alternative. Maxtor's 7200 RPM IDE drives incorporate a larger buffer to provide high-sustained data transfer rates that are important when working with large files such as multimedia and video. Maxtor is a leader in caching technology, employing sophisticated algorithms similar to those found in high-end SCSI drives. Maxtor's drives feature a 2 MB cache buffer incorporating a high-speed 100 MHz SDRAM memory, the same sort of memory found on today's high performance systems. Maxtor's 7200 RPM drives were the first IDE drives to be featured in a RAID level 5 configuration in an uncompressed nonlinear video editing system. The drive's high storage capacity, reliability and performance are well suited for this application. RAID level 5 provides protection against drive failures because in the event of a failure, the drive can be replaced without loss of data.