Seagate Drives Transition to Serial ATA, Winning Market Share Leadership by Providing Higher Performance and Reliability

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., Aug. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- As it continues to roll out its broad new line-up of disc drive products to the global computing market, Seagate Technology today announced that it has garnered an industry-leading 37% market share worldwide* for Serial ATA (SATA) disc drives in the second calendar quarter of 2005. At the Intel Developer Forum this week in San Francisco, booth 123, Seagate is demonstrating its latest SATA 3Gbit/second NCQ hard drives with a Silicon Image port multiplier and enclosure. Port multipliers provide expansion from one Serial ATA port to up to 15 SATA devices to enable low-cost bulk storage for archival, nearline and network-attached environments.

"The growing demand for more gigabytes and terabytes, from consumers to the enterprise, means a big need for low cost-per-gigabyte storage that delivers higher performance, reliability and scalability," said Jeff Loebbaka, vice president of Global Marketing at Seagate. "Seagate continues to meet these needs with a suite of disc drives across desktop, notebook, consumer electronics, and nearline enterprise applications that have lead the industry's transition to Serial ATA technology."

Powering Seagate's market leadership are its Barracuda 7200-RPM SATA disc drive family with Native Command Queuing (NCQ), a technology that increases performance and disc drive reliability by optimizing the way the drive processes data. Seagate was the first company to introduce NCQ on SATA hard drives.

Seagate recently began shipping its Momentus 5400-RPM and 7200-RPM notebook drives with the SATA interface and soon will introduce the company's first eSATA drive. eSATA is up to six times faster than existing external storage solutions with USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 interfaces, providing external data backup and protection at internal speeds up to 3 Gbit/second. Combined with an external RAID array, eSATA provides scalable fast external data storage for desktop PCs.

For enterprise applications, Seagate will begin shipping the NL35 Series SATA disc drive, a high-capacity enterprise-ready drive for cost-effective nearline storage. And later this year, the company will further expand its SATA offerings with the introduction of the Barracuda 7200.9 3 Gbit/second SATA hard drive. For more information about Seagate's SATA technology and drives, visit http://www.seagate.com/products/interface/sata .

Serial ATA is designed to replace parallel ATA technology and deliver a 10-year storage roadmap to 6 Gbit/second. All Seagate SATA drives are compatible with Serial ATA 2.5, the latest SATA specification. Serial ATA 2.5 integrates Serial ATA 1.0, all the optional advanced specifications and years of errata into a single document.

Seagate is a founding member of the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), the group responsible for developing and driving the adoption of SATA specifications such as native command queuing (NCQ), Hot Plug, Staggered Spin-up, and SATA 3Gb/s. Seagate SATA marketing manager Joni Clark is marketing chairwoman for the organization and Seagate senior I/O product planning manager Marc Noblitt is on the group's board of directors.

Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacturing and marketing of hard disc drives, providing products for a wide-range of Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, and Consumer Electronics applications. Seagate's business model leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, and to be the low cost producer in all markets in which it participates. The company is committed to providing award-winning products, customer support and reliability to meet the world's growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at http://www.seagate.com/.

NOTE: Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC. Barracuda, Momentus and NL35 Series are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC.

* Gartner Dataquest