Maxtor today announced that it will begin shipping 3.5" SATA and ATA harddrives with a capacity of 500 GByte in the third quarter of this year. The company said that it will make the new capacity available across its products line, including the QuickView series for consumer electronics, MaxLine for enterprise applications, DiamondMax for desktop C, Shared Storage for add-on storage in a home network and OneTouch external storage drives.

Maxtor one of the first large manufacturers to announce an increase in capacity from 400 to 500 GByte for its higher-end harddrives. Other companies such as Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital are expected to make similar announcements in the coming weeks. (THG)