Earlier this month, IBM announced a new line of Deskstar EIDE hard drives. The new Deskstar hard drives are the largest EIDE drives so far, having capacities up to 16.2 gigabytes. Quantum also recently announced a large 5.25-inch EIDE drive, with a maximum capacity of 12 gigabytes, but nothing as large as the new Deskstar.

How is IBM able to make these new drives with such high capacity? Well, IBM has developed two new technologies, both of which are being used in the new Deskstar products. One of the new technologies is a new drive head technology, Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR). GMR technology was originally discovered in 1988 and is just beginning to be used. The main advantage of GMR technology is that it has higher sensitivity to magnetic fields. This greater sensitivity allows the GMR heads to detect smaller data fields, allowing for more densely placed data. The greater sensitivity also allows for higher data transfer rates (a fast hard drive will usually make an overall system faster).

The other new technology developed by IBM is their No-ID technology. Normally, in part of each data sector, there is an ID sector. The ID contains information that identifies the data sector and also information about any errors on the drive. No-ID technology stores all the ID information into memory instead of on the drive surface. By doing this, more space is available in the data sectors themselves, allowing for greater data storage. When ID sectors are placed physically on the drive instead of in memory, they can take up to as much as 10 percent of a track.

There are two different models of the new Deskstar hard drives: the Deskstar 14GXP and the Deskstar 16GP. The main difference between the two models is that the Deskstar 14GXP spins at 7200 rpm (first EIDE hard drive to spin at 7200 rpm) and it stores up to 14.4 gigabytes of data. The Deskstar 16GP spins at 5400 rpm and has capacities up to 16.2 gigabytes. All the sizes of the Deskstar 14GXP and 16GP are 10.1,12.9,14.4 and 3.2,4.3,6.4,8.4,10.1,12.9,16.8 respectively.

Some additional features of the two drives are Ultra-Ata interface support, access time of 9.5 milliseconds, sustained data rates of six to 12 megabytes per second and eight to 13 megabytes per second for the Deskstar 16GP and 14GXP respectively, and a 512 cache. The 512 cache is an improvement over past EIDE drives which have mostly had only 128 kilobytes of cache. Only a few EIDE drives even had 256 kilobytes of cache.