Seagate Ships Nearline Ready High-Capacity SATA Drives to the Channel

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., Aug. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Seagate Technology , the world's #1 supplier of disc drives, today announced the availability of its nearline NL35 Series SATA disc drives to the worldwide distribution channel. The NL35 Series SATA disc drives are the first in the industry to include a comprehensive set of management and integration features designed specifically for nearline applications and workloads. The NL35 Series of Nearline Ready drives was created in response to the growing need for cost-effective high-capacity nearline storage in the enterprise to effectively fill the price/performance gap between online and offline storage.

"The increasing requirements of storing and managing fixed data from burgeoning email accounts, increasing digital imaging applications, and regulatory requirements are causing IT managers to consider lower-cost, nearline storage solutions based on drives such as Seagate's NL35 Series SATA drive," said Dave Reinsel, research director at IDC. "IDC believes the market for high-capacity, low-cost storage is primed for significant growth and forecasts over a 100% CAGR (2004-2009), from a terabyte perspective."

NL35 Series SATA = Nearline Ready

The NL35 Series SATA disc drives surpass ordinary desktop-class SATA drives that claim nearline readiness by actually providing the reliability and integration benefits needed for nearline applications like disc-to-disc backup, archive, and tiered storage.

These features include: Workload Management, Error Recovery Control, One-Step Microcode Download, and Write-Same technology. These features work together to perform a range of tasks from monitoring and managing each drive for reliability optimization, to streamlining error recovery, to simplifying multi-drive field upgrades, and more. Seagate understands the importance of workload, reliability, and integration ease for serving the needs of modern IT professionals.

"Bell Micro's customers are excited about the nearline opportunities and Seagate's ability to continue to provide this class of storage for all of today and tomorrow's growing IT requirements," said Joe Cousins, vice president of Marketing at Bell Micro. "The NL35 Series SATA drive's outstanding nearline features offer another level of storage management that our customers have never had access to. As a result, the NL35 Series SATA provides genuine added value."

"Seagate's NL35 Series SATA disc drive exemplifies our commitment to providing our channel customers with unique solutions that serve growing storage market needs," said Jeff Loebbaka, Seagate vice president of WW Channel Sales and Corporate Marketing. "And by offering our customers tools such as the Seagate Partner Program including incentives on evaluation units, Seagate can deliver additional value and a competitive edge for resellers around the globe."

NL35 Series SATA Details

The NL35 Series SATA is designed to enable enterprises to meet their storage performance and capacity requirements by allowing the combination of SAS and SATA drives together within the same SAS-based infrastructure. Hundreds of NL35 Series SATA drives can be deployed and managed within a single SAS domain, enabling highly scalable, cost-effective storage solutions for capacity-intensive nearline applications. The applications for nearline storage include: disc-to-disc backup/storage recovery, virtual tape backup/storage recovery, fixed content-addressed storage for image and document management, and lower-tiered storage of regulatory compliance or other business data. Seagate's NL35 Series SATA facilitates faster, more reliable backup/recovery for systems at lower overall cost versus traditional tape systems.

With 250 GB and 400 GB capacities, the NL35 Series SATA disc drive delivers increased storage capacity density and lowers the cost-per-gigabyte for nearline and secondary storage applications. Using the industry's most rigorous nearline MTBF test-bed script and applications, Seagate's NL35 Series SATA earns a genuine one million hour MTBF rating. The NL35 Series SATA also includes 16 MB cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

About the NL35 Series Nearline Family

The NL35 Series SATA is the latest addition to the NL35 nearline family and the first to be offered directly to the channel. Seagate's integration-friendly NL35 nearline family of drives are positioned to serve in all the necessary nearline and secondary storage space for Serial ATA (SATA), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel-based enterprise infrastructures. The NL35 Series Fibre Channel drive is currently shipping to system OEMs and is optimized for use within networked Fibre Channel enterprise systems. The NL35 Series SATA is ideal for seamless integration within direct-attached environments using SATA or SAS.

NL35 Series SATA and the Tiered Storage Knowledge Center

NL35 Series SATA disc drives are ideal for tiered storage. And Seagate's Tiered Storage Knowledge Center is the ideal online interactive tool that delivers expert advice for optimizing storage infrastructures. With the cost and complexity of storage required by IT professionals, designing a system that satisfies the ever-increasing demands can be a daunting task. Using optimized tiered storage solutions can make all the difference. Seagate NL35 Series SATA and Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 SAS disc drives are ideal companions for effective tiered storage use.

For more information about the Seagate NL35 Series nearline family or to learn how to optimize your storage infrastructure, visit the Seagate Tiered Storage Knowledge Center at http://tieredstorage.seagate.com/. For more information about Seagate enterprise solutions, visit http://www.seagate.com/ .

About Seagate

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/ .

Seagate and Seagate Technology are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC. The Wave logo, and NL35 are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or one of its affiliates. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity. Accessible capacity may vary depending on operating environment and formatting.