It's DiamondMax Plus 8
It is DiamondMax Plus 8. It has one of the highest areal density among currrent IDE harddisks, with 40 Gb per SIDE (and per head) of a platter. It only uses one side of the platter, so it has only one head. Another new line of IDE harddisk from Maxtor, DiamondMax Plus 9, also has 40 Gb per side but has one head on each side of the platter giving 80 Gb per platter.
This DiamondMax Plus 8 surprises many people because of its AMAZING transfer rate! It is now easily the champ in transfer rate, beating its sibbling DiamondMax Plus 9, beating even WesternD's JB series by a wide margin! How fast? Fastest 63 Mb/sec for inner track, and 51 Mb/sec average!
http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?t=6155
http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?t=5956
http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?t=5614
It's access time is, however, nothing to shout about, being simliar to Dmax+9, and a tad below the older D740.
Formal benchmark aside, what about real life experience? I have all the above three types of Maxtor harddisk, D740, Dmax+8, and Dmax+9. My main computing tasks are video and graphics which involve large files read/write, and true to its blazing fast transfer rate, Dmax+8 is noticably faster to work with.