In the last few months, IDE hard drive capacity has come close to the limitations of the venerable 28-bit LBA standard that limits ATA drives to 137GB. Now Maxtor has moved way past this with the launch of the 160GB flagship version of the D540X drive range.

To achieve this, Maxtor uses what it calls the 'Big Drive' initiative; this extends the addressable space to 48 bits. That's 144 petabytes or 144 million gigabytes. Maxtor also stands alone among major drive manufacturers in pushing ATA-133, the last probable extension to the ATA standard before the phasing in of Serial ATA. To make it more attractive, Maxtor bundles an own-brand Promise Ultra-133 TX2 PCI card controller with the drive, but the review drive didn't come with any drivers for the card, which we had to download from the Web.

The huge capacity of the D540X is achieved by using four of Maxtor's 40GB platters, backed up by a 2MB buffer and a spin speed of only 5,400rpm, so although the D540X has a huge capacity it isn't a high performance drive. Maxtor claims a specified seek time of 12 milliseconds, but when tested the drive gave a seek time of 9.4 milliseconds, well within Maxtor's conservative estimate.

The D540X is not too noisy either, using Maxtor's own Quiet Drive Technology to keep any noise made by the drive mechanics down to acceptable limits. And when tested it didn't to get too warm, so there is no need to worry about using active drive cooling with the D540X.

Several huge capacity hard drives are available now, but the D540X drives (also available as a smaller 120GB model) are the only ones using the ATA-133 standard. The only drive that gets close to this one in capacity terms is Seagate's 180GB SCSI drive. That's certainly faster, but at the expense of the noise and heat associated with a half-height SCSI drive.

As with all its drives, Maxtor protects the D540X with Shock Protection and Data Protection systems and it comes with a three-year warranty.

While the D540X isn't the fastest hard drive on the block, it certainly has the most capacity of any IDE drive available at the moment. If you just need a huge capacity hard drive without worrying about high-end performance then there's not much to touch this 160GB drive.