Seagate Announces New Cheetah 15K.5 Hard Drives for Customers that Require the World’s Fastest, Most Reliable Enterprise Storage

Perpendicular recording technology provides up to 300 gigabytes of capacity at super-fast 15K-RPM speed

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.—18 April 2006— Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) today announced its Cheetah 15K.5 hard drive, the latest generation of Seagate’s acclaimed flagship enterprise product line. With a strong family history of record-breaking achievements, the new Cheetah 15K.5 drive sets the pace once again for fulfilling the needs of the enterprise by delivering the world’s fastest performance with the highest reliability and capacity ever offered in a 15K drive.

Available with up to 300 gigabytes capacity and 30% increased performance, the Cheetah 15K.5 delivers the best price-per-performance in its class. The Cheetah 15K.5 hard drive enables a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a wide variety of enterprise applications from e-mail, Internet, and e-commerce, to business processing and decision support.

The Cheetah 15K.5 leveraged Seagate’s R&D leadership to create the world’s first enterprise hard drive with perpendicular recording. Perpendicular recording technology lets the Cheetah 15K.5 deliver twice the capacity of 15K drives currently available while providing a performance increase over previous generations by as large as 30%.

Seagate is now shipping the Cheetah 15K.5 to leading OEM Customers. The Cheetah 15K.5 will be launched to the Distribution Channel later this quarter.

Enterprise Storage is the Backbone of your Digital Life

"Datacenter storage requirements, on average, are increasing 55%-60% per year based not only on internal business processing needs, but also the increasing demand to deliver content to a growing number of digital devices worldwide" said Dave Reinsel, director of storage hardware research at IDC. "Whether it be for entertainment or business, products like Seagate’s new Cheetah 15K.5 provide companies an opportunity to reinforce their enterprise storage backbone with high performance and high capacity disk drives"

"Storage needs have grown in scale that are almost unimaginable today as digital content is everywhere in our daily lives" said Sherman Black, senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute. "From traditional computers, to devices in the home such as personal video recorders, to handheld devices like portable music players or cellular phones, it is critical that enterprise storage on the back end is optimized to work in these demanding environments with high availability and performance"

Cheetah is the Drive Family of Choice for World-Class Enterprise OEMs

Seagate Cheetah 15K RPM drives are not only the industry’s fastest and most reliable family of disc drives, they are also the leading choice of OEM’s committed to delivering the best price-per-performance possible in their enterprise systems. The Storage Performance Council (SPC) is the premier organization that provides fully audited price-per-performance benchmark data of OEM enterprise storage systems.

"Cheetah 15K-enabled systems have consistently been reported as being in the majority with world class performance and price-performance SPC benchmark results" said Walter E. Baker, administrator of the Storage Performance Council. "Notably, all six of the inaugural SPC-2 results were configured with Cheetah 15K drives. The configurations ranged from 14 to 672 drives, which demonstrates the ability to deliver outstanding performance across a wide range of enterprise configurations. This is a strong testimony to the Cheetah family’s outstanding design attributes"

Cheetah 15K.5: Built to Perform Like No Other

The Cheetah 15K.5 is designed and manufactured by the same teams that successfully delivered the past four award-winning generations of Cheetah 15K. Its 15K RPM and fast seek times deliver the fastest time-to-data, resulting in 30 percent more I/O’s-per-second and more than 20 percent faster response times than typical 3.5-inch 10K RPM drives.

The Cheetah 15K.5 is available in a choice of 3 Gb/sec Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Ultra320 SCSI, and 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel interfaces with capacities of 73, 147, and 300 gigabytes. It delivers an industry-leading Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) reliability rating of 1.4 million hours at full duty cycle.

About Seagate
Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture 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 www.seagate.com.

Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC. Cheetah is a trademark or registered trademark 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.

Contact Information

David Szabados

Media Contact

Seagate Technology LLC

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