Seagate Announce Breakthrough Serial ATA Interface

SEAGATE ANNOUNCES BREAKTHROUGH SERIAL ATA INTERFACE WILL ENABLE 600-MB-PER-SECOND DATA TRANSFERS AT TRADITIONAL ATA COST

Seagate, Intel ready Serial ATA products to enable fast mini PCs, removable car-computers, music players and other digital devices

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - August 29, 2001 - Seagate today announced the release of the breakthrough Serial ATA storage interface that will ultimately transfer data at an amazing 600 Mbytes per second - six times faster than the current ATA standard - and allow more complex, flexible and intelligent multi-drive systems. Seagate and Intel today are demonstrating the world's first fully-compliant prototype Serial ATA hard drive with native hot-pluggability, at the Intel Developers Forum, San Jose. Seagate played a leading role in the two-year effort to bring Serial ATA to market, and the specification was formally released today by Seagate, APT, Dell, IBM, Intel and Maxtor as the successor to the Ultra ATA/100 interface.

Seagate also announced plans to provide the first Serial ATA hard drives to the market next year. Seagate has readied its current Barracuda ATA products to ship with the Serial ATA interface as soon as leading chip providers release Serial ATA discrete host controllers on add-in cards and motherboards. Together, these products will enable the PC and Consumer Electronics (CE) industries to begin a transition to Serial ATA products by next year. Allowing a simple and cost-effective transition, Serial ATA provides a cost structure similar to Parallel ATA, and is 100-percent backward compatible with legacy Ultra ATA/100 software and drivers.

By its third generation, Serial ATA will enable data rates of 600 Mbytes per second at an affordable ATA cost, allowing a fantastic future of data-intensive and entertainment-heavy content delivered via PCs, home network hubs and CE devices with unprecedented speed. Because it's hot-pluggable, Serial ATA simplifies new-generation ATA devices like removable in-dash car computers and music players. Its future superset functions like enhanced command queuing will bring users the right data more quickly than ever, at the right time. Serial ATA's incredibly simple, small cables and its low power requirements make possible entirely new, smaller form factors in the PC, mobile and CE world.

"Intel has worked closely with Seagate to demonstrate Serial ATA and the vast performance benefits it brings to PCs. We plan to offer our first Serial ATA solutions next year along with Seagate and other leading vendors," said Jason Ziller, Intel technology initiatives manager and Serial ATA Working Group chairman. "With Serial ATA's inherent benefits over Parallel ATA, Intel plans to focus on it as the ATA storage solution succeeding ATA/100."

"All manufacturers of Parallel ATA peripherals should be prepared to make a complete transition to Serial ATA technologies no later than the fourth quarter of 2003," said John Monroe, chief analyst at Gartner Dataquest. "Many inherent features of the current ATA architecture make it difficult to scale and will soon render it obsolete. Serial ATA will not only become the standard drive interface for all desktops and notebook PCs, but will also enable a more effective use of high-performance desktop-class drives in multiuser applications."

"With Serial ATA's incredible speed advances, we can scale hard drive performance up far into the future," said Marc Noblitt, Seagate manager of Interface Planning. "It's easier to install and configure, because it's plug and play, has no jumpers, and allows point to point connection. Simple, thin cables and small connectors provide more space in any device box to improve system cooling, and enable greater design freedom for new form factor systems. It also provides the opportunity for power-on-cable, which can be especially valuable as we look at smaller form factor disc drives. From an operating system and developer's point of view, Serial ATA is a drop-in replacement for Parallel ATA - it offers 100-percent software compatibility and an easy transition for the PC industry."

Built for the future from the ground up, Serial ATA is the first completely new PC storage interface technology since Parallel ATA technology was introduced 20 years ago. The timing of Serial ATA implementation is ideal. Initial Serial ATA transfer rates above 150 Mbytes per second will be implemented by all major chipset makers well before hard drive transfer rates exceed the capability of the current Ultra ATA/100 interface. In the future, an enhanced breed of Serial ATA for entry server markets will be introduced to enable superset features previously unique to SCSI devices.

Seagate is the world's leading provider of storage technology for Internet, business and consumer applications. The Company's products include disc drives for the Enterprise, PCs and Consumer Electronics, as well as Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions. Seagate's market leadership is based on delivering 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.

This press release includes forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, delays and difficulties in research and development activities, technical difficulties, changes in the allocation of resources available for research and development, and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Actual results may differ materially from management expectations.

Seagate, Seagate Technology and Barracuda are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

James Cooper Account Coordinator Text 100 Public Relations Global High Technology Public Relations

S 61 2 9956 5733 D 61 2 8923 9522 M 0402 134 400 E jamesc@text100.com.au
URL www.text100.com

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