Seagate Expands Desktop Hard Drive Lead with 750GB Monster Built on Perpendicular Recording Technology

With the introduction of Barracuda 7200.10 family, Seagate now leverages perpendicular recording technology across its desktop, notebook, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail hard drives

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.—26 April 2006— Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX), the world’s number one hard drive maker, today surged to new levels of areal density and storage capacity leadership with the introduction of the world’s first desktop hard drive to hit the 750GB capacity mark. The monster drive is part of the new Barracuda 7200.10 family built on perpendicular recording technology to meet the growing storage capacity, performance and reliability requirements of desktop computers and low-end servers.

The new Barracuda 7200.10 family is now shipping to the worldwide distribution channel. With the introduction of these drives, Seagate now delivers perpendicular recording technology across its desktop, notebook, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail hard drives. The technology stands data bits vertically onto the disc media, rather than horizontal to the surface as with traditional longitudinal recording, to deliver new levels of hard drive data density, capacity and reliability. The new data orientation also increases drive throughput without increasing spin speed by allowing more data bits to pass under the drive head in the same amount of time.

"Strong demand for personal computers and servers with unprecedented storage capacity continues as organizations and consumers worldwide rely on ever-higher volumes of digital content" said Karl Chicca, Seagate senior vice president and general manager, Personal Storage. "Underscoring this trend is the petabytes of music, photos and movies, computer games and other digital content spawned by the proliferation of consumer electronics services and devices. All of this information feeds a growing need for storage in what is fast becoming the center of the digital lifestyle - the home PC"

"Seagate is meeting these requirements with the hard drive industry’s most advanced storage capabilities, and we’ll continue to develop leading drives and technologies that will enable organizations and consumers to remain ahead of the capacity, performance and reliability curve" Chicca said.

The industry’s leading combination of performance, capacity and reliability

To meet the growing storage capacity requirements of both PCs and servers, the Barracuda 7200.10 family provides 200GB to 750GB of capacity on the strength of industry-leading data density of 130 Gigabits per square inch (up to 188 Gigabytes per disc). Seagate’s unmatched data density delivers the best reliability and performance of any PC hard drive in its class.

Barracuda 7200.10 also features cache sizes from 8MB to 16MB and 1.5Gb/s and 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) data transfer rates with Native Command Queuing. NCQ enhances reliability in heavy workloads by reducing head movement and streamlining the delivery of queued commands to the drive.

Backed by Seagate’s industry-leading 5-year warranty, the 7200-rpm Barracuda 7200.10 family is ideal for system builders requiring the industry’s leading combination of hard drive capacity, performance and reliability for single-user systems such as desktop PC RAID, digital editing, hot-rod gaming, single-drive external storage and consumer PCs. The drives also provide the high throughput and low cost-per-gigabyte storage required for multi-user systems such as low-cost servers for small offices.

"With data center storage requirements increasing at a rate of 50 percent to 60 percent per year, and users storing more hours of digitized video on hard disk drives, demand is growing for disk drives with higher storage capacities" said John Rydning, IDC’s Research Manager for hard disc drives. "Seagate’s new Barracuda 7200.10 ups the ante for desktop-class drives, providing up to 750GB of capacity to meet these growing storage needs"

Barracuda 7200.10 - Much more than record levels of storage capacity

Seagate is the first hard drive maker to bring perpendicular recording to desktop hard drives, was the first to deliver NCQ technology and has innovated a number of other capabilities that have set industry standards in desktop drive acoustics and shock tolerance. With Barracuda 7200.10, Seagate offers even more technological advances, delivering these unique, leading-edge capabilities:

Adaptive Fly Height - Maximizes the consistency of read/write performance across the entire disc by adjusting the fly height (distance between the disc head and platter) according to changes in environmental operating conditions.

Clean Sweep - Helps maintain media integrity and drive reliability by passing the drive head over the entire platter during power-on to smooth out any irregularities in the disc surface.

Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacturing 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. Barracuda 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.

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Mike Hall

Seagate Technology

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