All DiamondMax Plus 9 series drives include Fluid Dynamic Bearing motors (for reduced noise) and Maxtor Data/Shock Protection Systems. Keep in mind this isn't the latest and greatest from Maxtor; the new DiamondMax 10 series has drives ranging from 80-300GB with lower 9ms seek times and 8-16MB buffers depending on drive capacity. As for platter density, it remains a mystery. Maxtor purposely doesn't list how many platters are used in their drives or what the densities are because identical capacity drives sometimes have varying amounts of these. The announcement was that DiamondMax Plus 9 drives would use 80GB platters, but some use 60GB platters while others have 66GB ones, which may or may not be fully utilized. Needless to say, it's a mess. We'll assume that our model has a pair of 80GB platters, but we can't say for sure (the serial number on our drive indicates it might even have 4x 40GB platters!). The bottom of the drive has an Agere controller (same as Seagate drives, which use LSI Logic as well) and 6ns Hynix cache memory.