Norton Speed Disk Surpasses Diskeeper in NSTL Tests; Speed Disk Offers Significant Application Performance Gains, Lower Optimization Times Than Competitor.

Business/Tech Editors

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 22, 2000

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that Norton Speed Disk 5.0 outperformed Executive Software's Diskeeper 5.0 in independent lab tests conducted by NSTL, the leading independent hardware and software testing organization for the computer industry. According to the results released by NSTL, in this set of tests Speed Disk was not only more consistent at improving application performance than was Diskeeper, but Speed Disk optimizations were also significantly faster.

"As the first and most highly respected independent testing organization in the industry, NSTL provides organizations the information they rely on to make sound IT investment decisions," said Elizabeth Magliana, vice president of product management, Enterprise Solutions Division, Symantec Corporation. "We are pleased that after placing Norton Speed Disk through a head-to-head comparison with its nearest competitor, NSTL test results concur with scores of previous reviewers who point to Speed Disk as the most effective disk optimization tool available."

Speed Disk improved the performance of all five of the applications used in the testing, boasting an average performance gain of 13 percent. Diskeeper, however, improved the performance of only three of the five applications, for an average performance gain across all applications of just 1.7 percent. In the product performance comparison between Speed Disk/Diskeeper, NSTL employed five applications that were deemed representative of the most common applications in the industry and featured varied disk access patterns. The applications included CA-ArcServe, MS-Excel, MS-Exchange/Outlook, MS-IIS, and MS-SQL. Performance measurements were observed on the five applications at three distinct points during testing: before disk optimization or defragmentation, after Speed Disk disk optimizations, and after Diskeeper disk defrags.

With MS-SQL files, Speed Disk resulted in a 21.7 percent performance gain compared to Diskeeper's 5.9 percent. In one specific test with Excel files, Diskeeper actually degraded performance which NSTL staff attributed to free space fragmentation, file placement, NTFS internals or the specific drive used. On another test, Diskeeper degraded the performance of Exchange/Outlook performance timings while performance gains through Speed Disk averaged 15.8 percent. CA-ArcServe files saw a performance gain of 15.9 percent with Speed Disk compared to Diskeeper's 12.4 percent.

Speed Disk also provided superior optimization times compared to Diskeeper. Diskeeper was 41.6 percent slower, requiring an extra 9.25 hours to complete its defragmentations on approximately 210,000 files on 19GB of disk space.

In addition, Speed Disk did not require any system downtime to perform optimizations while Diskeeper required 23 hours of downtime of its total 31.5 hours of processing to perform file defragmentations. Diskeeper required one reboot to defrag the server and one reboot to defrag the workstation while Speed Disk did not require any system reboots to perform its optimization.

About Symantec

Symantec, a world leader in Internet security technology, provides a broad range of content and network security solutions to individuals and companies. The company is a leading provider of anti-virus protection, vulnerability assessment, Internet content and e-mail filtering, and mobile code detection technologies to enterprise customers. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has worldwide operations in more than 24 countries.

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