Seagate Introduces 23-Gbyte Elite Disc Drive; New Elite 23 beats capacity of any drive shipping today by more than two-and-a-half times.

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 26, 1996--Seagate Technology, Inc. (NYSE:SEG) today introduced the industry's highest-capacity disc drive, the 23.4 Gbyte, 5.25-inch Elite 23 (ST423451). The new drive provides more than two-and-a-half times the capacity of the next largest disc drive available today. The industry-leading capacity of the Elite 23 makes it ideal for storage-hungry mainframe applications, enterprise and departmental servers, and digital audio/video (A/V) applications.

The 23 Gbyte drive maintains the Elite family's reputation for offering the best cost-per-megabyte storage solution for high-capacity applications. The Elite 23 leverages many of the proven technologies and designs built into Seagate's third-generation Barracuda 9 and Barracuda 4LP drives. The 5,400-rpm Elite 23 employs magneto-resistive (MR) heads and partial response-maximum likelihood (PRML) technology, while also optimizing drive performance with Seagate's Advanced SCSI Architecture II (ASA-II) code.

"Seagate continues to raise the industry standards by offering some of the industry's highest-capacity highest-performance storage products. The Elite 23 is another example of Seagate's technological leadership, demonstrating the company's ability to implement advanced storage technology and innovation in mass-produced products," said Bernie Carballo, Seagate's executive vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Product Line Management. "We have designed the Elite 23 with a new hard drive assembly, printed circuit board and head/media interface to optimize the drive for greater reliability and manufacturability. Seagate has been able to develop such an advanced disc drive, the fifth in its generation, by fully utilizing the company's expertise in designing high-performance 3.5-inch disc drives and then leveraging the technology to the larger 5.25-inch form factor. No other disc drive on the market today matches the capacity found in the Elite 23."

"Corporate server and mainframe environments are fueling the need for even greater amounts of storage capacity available in an online format, and this trend is expected to continue," said Phil Devin, vice president and principal analyst at Dataquest. "The Elite 23 is the result of Seagate's extensive experience in high-end, magnetic disc storage and is well positioned to cost-effectively advance the capabilities and performance of high-end servers. The drive is ideally suited to provide customers with the necessary storage capacity to expand the capabilities of legacy systems or develop new cost-effective server and mainframe applications with increased functionality and online storage capacity."

Seagate's 14-disc Elite 23 is available with either the 8-bit or 16-bit UltraSCSI interface, which delivers up to a 40 Mbyte/second peak data transfer rate and is fully compatible with existing Fast SCSI-2 and Fast Wide SCSI-2 peripherals. The Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) serial interface standard is also supported for even greater performance. This re-affirms Seagate's commitment to FC-AL and UltraSCSI as the industry-standard choices in leading-edge interface technology. The drive provides a sustained formatted data transfer ranging from 8.2-12.1 Mbytes per second and features a 2,048 Kbyte multi-segmented, adaptive cache for accelerated performance. High reliability is engineered throughout the Elite 23, raising the disc drive's mean time between failure (MTBF) rating to 800,000 hours while backed by a five year warranty.

The Elite 23 is one of Seagate's first high-end disc drives to utilize embedded servo technology. With this technology, data created by the disc drive to inform the actuator arm of its location relative to the disc media surface is interlaced with user data across all of the platters of the disc drive. With the Elite 23's high formatting efficiency, the new disc drive maintains the higher capacity and data transfer rates common to models utilizing more conventional dedicated servo technology while eliminating the need for thermal recalibration. Thermal recalibration has historically been one of the most common causes for delays in data availability, which can result in missed video frames or muddled sound in performance-sensitive A/V applications.

Evaluations units of the Elite 23 (ST423451) are scheduled for availability in the third calendar quarter of 1996, with production quantities scheduled for availability later the same quarter.

Seagate Technology Inc. is a data technology company that provides products for storing, managing and accessing digital information on the world's computer and communications systems. Seagate is the largest independent disc drive and related components company in the world. The company's home page address on the World Wide Web is http://www.seagate.com.

CONTACT: Seagate Technology, Inc.

Woody Monroy, 408/439-2838

Tyson Heyn, 408/439-2859