Product Description
Maxtor Fireball3
2-5
Read/Write Electronics
An integrated circuit mounted within the sealed head disk assembly (near the read/
write heads) provides up to eight head selection depending on the model. It also
provides read pre-amplification and write drive circuitry.
Read/Write Heads and Media
Low mass, low force giant magneto-resistive read/write heads record data on 3.5-
inch diameter disks. Maxtor uses a sputtered thin film medium on all disks for
Maxtor hard drives.
Air Filtration System
All Maxtor hard drives are assembled in a Class 100 controlled environment. Over
the life of the drive, a 0.1 micron filter and breather filter located within the sealed
head disk assembly (HDA) maintain a clean environment to the heads and disks.
Maxtor drives are designed to operate in a typical office environment with
minimum environmental control.
Microprocessor
The microprocessor controls the following functions for the drive electronics:
• Command execution
• Cache management
• Data correction and error recovery
• Diagnostic execution
• Data sequencing
• Head positioning (including error recovery)
• Host interface
• Index detection
• Spin speed control
• Seeks
• Servo
• SMART
2.6
Subsystem Configuration
Dual Drive Support
Two drives may be accessed via a common interface cable, using the same range of
I/O addresses. The drives have a jumper configuration as device 0 or 1 (Master/
Slave), and are selected by the drive select bit in the Device/Head register of the
task file.
All Task File registers are written in parallel to both drives. The interface processor
on each drive decides whether a command written to it should be executed; this