Hmm...This is just confusing;

The speeds quoted suggest to me that the limiting factor is the IDE interface, and not the underlying media.

That raises the question "Why IDE?". Although IDE speeds are far superior to those of 5 years ago, and are now comparable to SCSI, IDE is still inferior to SCSI in one important aspect - Bus topology and contention.

You can still only have 2 devices on an IDE channel, and to get best performance, ideally you still only want 1 per channel. SCSI on the other hand deals with many drives on a controller without as much degradation.

If this was targeted to enterprise database applications, then surely it would have been designed with a SCSI interface. Sure, you could encourage customers to buy expensive multi-IDE controller cards to drive these, but as they are generally already set up for SCSI, that doesn't make sense.

It's my guess that we'll all own these soon - sort of. I'd hazard a guess that these have been designed with military and aerospace datalogging applications in mind.