Seagate introduces Cheetah -- the world's first 10,000-rpm disc drive family; world's highest-performance drives deliver unprecedented fast access times and high sustained formatted data transfer rates.

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 28, 1996--Seagate Technology, Inc. (NYSE:SEG) today introduced the industry's fastest disc drives, the 10,000-rpm, 9.1 Gbyte (ST19101) and 4.55 Gbyte (ST34501) Cheetah family.

As the world's first-announced drives to utilize 10,000-rpm technology, their increased rotational speed packs a 1-2 punch by remarkably increasing data transfer rates while also significantly improving the access time to data.

With the higher spindle speed, Cheetah's internal formatted data transfer rates jump to an unprecedented 15 Mbytes/second -- an impressive rate 40% greater than that of 7,200-rpm drives. The 10,000-rpm rotational rate also reduces the Cheetah's average latency times to under 3 msec while advanced embedded servo technology reduces seek time.

The high-performance Cheetah disc drives are ideal for the many applications requiring extremely fast data access, quick data throughput and high data availability, including transaction processing systems, scientific and graphic processing systems, a wide variety of network file and enterprise servers, and professional audio/video (A/V) applications.

"Seagate's pioneering of the 10,000-rpm technology enables OEMs, VARs, and system integrators to take advantage of performance levels that were previously unattainable," said Bernie Carballo, Seagate's executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing. "Seagate has continually set the standard for high performance disc drives by being the first to bring 5,400-rpm rotational speeds to market with the Elite family, then first to introduce 7,200-rpm spindle speeds with the 3.5-inch Barracuda family, and now the first to introduce 10,000-rpm performance with the 3.5-inch Cheetah family.

"The Cheetah series builds on the solid foundation Seagate has established for designing, developing, and manufacturing some of the industry's highest-performance disc drives which enable our customers to achieve higher levels of system performance and to introduce exciting new applications."

"Sony has performed benchmark tests with the new 10,000-rpm Cheetah drive, the Seagate ST34501, against comparable 4.55-Gbyte, 7,200-rpm drives. We were pleased with the performance of the Cheetah drives and impressed that Seagate has again achieved a significant, new level of disc drive performance," commented Mr. Yamasaki, General Manager of Sony's Professional Computer Division. "We expect the Cheetah will create new markets for high-performance, digital video applications."

To take advantage of the performance potential of Seagate's Cheetah drives, the 9.1 Gbyte half-height and 4.55 Gbyte low-profile drives support the latest in high-performance, industry-standard interfaces: UltraSCSI and Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL). UltraSCSI provides an easy migration path for parallel SCSI users to double their interface bandwidth.

Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) is the world's first truly open industry-standard serial interface with an unprecedented 100 Mbyte/second transfer rate, making it a perfect complement to the high performance available from the Cheetah. FC-AL also addresses I/O subsystem requirements for connectivity, distance, fault tolerance and high reliability/availability.

The Seagate Cheetah drive family shares a common design heritage with the award-winning Seagate Barracuda family. This enables systems designers to easily incorporate both drive families, each offering the same capacities, form factors, and interfaces. In addition, each family utilizes Seagate's latest Advanced SCSI Architecture (ASA-II) technology to dramatically lower command overhead, increase overall performance, and maintain code and feature set commonality.

Both families share many common attributes and technologies, such as a 1,000,000-hour mean time between failure (MTBF) and standard 5-year warranty, MR heads and PRML data channel, industry-standard Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.), SCAM-2 plug-and-play, and SCSI-3 SPI compliance as a part of the drives' design for use in RAID and other hot-plug environments.

Evaluation units of the low-profile, 4.55-Gbyte ST34501 and half-height, 9.1-Gbyte ST19101 Cheetah drives are scheduled for availability in the first quarter of 1997. Production quantities are scheduled for availability in the second quarter of 1997.

Seagate Technology, Inc. is a data technology company that provides products for storing, managing and accessing digital information on the world's computer and data 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.

Tyson Heyn, 408/439-2859

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Woody Monroy, 408/439-2838

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