BiTMICRO NETWORKS First to Market 2.5-Inch Ultra EIDE Solid State Flash Disk Storage Breakthrough.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Embedded Systems Conference 2000

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 25, 2000

Optimized E-Disk ATX25 with 4.3 GB Capacity and

Greater Than 14 MB/sec Sustained Random Read/Write Rates

Creates the Best Fit for Embedded Internet Systems

Environments and Transaction Intensive Applications

At the Embedded Systems Conference 2000 being held in San Jose, Calif., BiTMICRO NETWORKS, a supplier of high-performance storage solutions, unveiled the world's first 2.5-inch Ultra EIDE E-Disk ATX25 intelligent solid state flash disk.

BiTMICRO's ATX25 is designed to meet the ever-increasing demand in performance and reliability of information storage in today's embedded systems and enterprise computing environments. This family of drives is a follow-on to BiTMICRO's earlier successful introductions of 2.5-inch ATI25 and ATE25 series of flash-based solid state E-Disks.

The ATX25 E-Disk utilizes a combination of BiTMICRO's patented FlashBus advancements and state-of-the-art core technologies, enabling users of today's sophisticated embedded systems to fully access the power of computing. Featuring a 0.1 millisecond storage system access time and a sustained random read/write transfer rates of more than 14 MBytes per second -- nearly saturating the maximum bus speed of 16.6 MBytes per second, the ATX25 is the world's fastest 2.5-inch ATA interface flash drive to date.

With solid state construction and no moving parts, ATX25 can withstand 1,000 Gs of operating shock, 16.4 Gs (rms) of operating vibration and extreme operating temperatures ranging from -40 to +85 degrees centigrade. ATX25 storage capacity range from 128 MBytes to 4.3 GBytes. BiTMICRO also implements a combination of proprietary wear-leveling and remapping techniques, prolonging the effective E-Disk erase/write endurance by orders of magnitude. For example, a typical endurance write cycle of a 1 GB E-Disk being written 100 GBytes per day is 27 years and at 100 MBytes per day is 28,000 years.

"The ATX25 strengthens BiTMICRO's leadership in this important IDE product category," said Tom Griffin, BiTMICRO's vice president of marketing and sales. "As embedded systems migrate to internet applications and appliances there is a need for both high performance and outstanding reliability in the data storage area. Our E-disk products meet the needs of users in this new emerging sector, offering outstanding performance and reliability in a plug and play form factor."

The ATX25 line also incorporates BiTMICRO's DataSentinel, the industry's most comprehensive data protection package. Monitoring power fluctuations and operating transparently in the background, DataSentinel provides automatic data protection. It improves data integrity by performing cyclic redundancy checks designed specifically for use with flash devices. DataSentinel's custom on-the-fly Error Correction Code logic is capable of correcting multiple error bursts without performance loss, a million times more powerful than its closest competitor.

The E-Disks are plug-and-play solutions that have been tested on all major platforms. E-Disks are fully compatible with Linux, Solaris, Windows NT, MacOS, and LynxOS. Other supported operating systems include AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, NetBSD, OS/2, QNX, VxWorks, SCO Unixware and OpenServer, Solaris X86, and Tru64.

"BiTMICRO is responding to the continuing increases in the demand for data storage performance with this new product family," said Rudy Bruce, BiTMICRO's founder and CEO. "We believe ATX25 demonstrates our ability to meet the storage demands of today and anticipate the needs of tomorrow," added Bruce.

Available now, the new ATX25 is a drop-in replacement for any standard 2.5-inch IDE hard disk drive, flash disk or solid state disk drive in systems seeking higher performance, portability and reliability. For product pricing and information, contact BiTMICRO NETWORKS at http://www.bitmicro.com or 510/74E-DISK.

BiTMICRO's E-Disk line of products will be showcased at the following conferences and tradeshows: Embedded Systems Conference Booth 8044, Sep 24-28, 2000, San Jose, California; ORACLE OpenWorld 2000 Booth 641, Oct 1-5, 2000, San Francisco, California; Global Venture Forum, Oct 18-20, 2000, Osaka, Japan; COMDEX Fall 2000 FCIA Booth, Nov 13-17, 2000, Las Vegas, Nevada; COTScon West 2000 Booth 38, Dec 12-13, 2000, San Diego, California; CeBIT 2001 FCIA Booth, Mar 22-28, 2001, Hannover, Germany; and COTScon East 2001 Booth 166, May 31-Jun 1, 2001, Washington DC.

About BiTMICRO NETWORKS

BiTMICRO NETWORKS, Inc., a privately held California corporation, is the world's premier supplier of high performance, highly reliable, and scalable solid state flash storage solutions. BiTMICRO's storage solutions offer unmatched performance, data availability, and manageability across a spectrum of computing platforms from entry systems to super computers. BiTMICRO's storage product lines address a wide range of applications and operating systems needs including storage area networking (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS).

The company is a member of the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) and Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).

Note to Editors: E-Disk(TM), FlashBus(TM), PowerGuard(TM), DataSentinel(TM), and BiTMICRO(TM) are trademarks of BiTMICRO NETWORKS, Inc. Others are trademarks of their respective companies or other countries.