Seagate Delivers World's First 1TB Drive With SAS Interface

Unprecedented performance along with improved data integrity over SATA, makes the Barracuda(R) ES.2 SAS hard drive the ideal solution for expanding Nearline applications

ORLANDO, Fla., April 7, 2008 -- Storage Networking World -- Seagate (NYSE:STX) today announced it has begun worldwide shipment of its 1 terabyte (TB) enterprise-class Barracuda(R) ES.2 hard drives with a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. Applications addressing rich media content and collaborative applications like email can benefit from the average 135% performance boost over SATA-interface drives along with robust enterprise features and native compatibility.

"The explosion of content in enterprise environments is driving the need for faster data access and bandwidth that Seagate's 1TB Barracuda ES.2 drives can deliver with a SAS interface," said Sherman Black, Seagate senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. "SAS dual-port capability with redundancy, improved performance and data integrity make this drive the perfect low-cost/GB enterprise-ready drive for our customers."

SAS also enables greater system-design and integration flexibility for solution providers who are eager to offer even greater value options to their customers. "The higher performance and inherently lower total cost of ownership (TCO) make Barracuda ES.2 drives with SAS a perfect choice for many of our customers," said Joe Cousins, vice president, Marketing at Bell Microproducts. "With the added enterprise features found within SAS all merging into a lower-cost package, we anticipate our customers will be very interested in building and deploying SAS-based systems with Seagate(R) drives."

With the introduction of the Barracuda ES.2 drive, Seagate is first to provide customers with a SAS interface option in addition to its SATA model, which began shipping last year. For major system providers including HP, SAS offers greater levels of data integrity and performance for business-critical and nearline enterprise environments.

"As a leader in the enterprise, HP ProLiant servers and storage technologies help customers to manage their datacenter infrastructure with confidence," said Ron Noblett, vice president, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "We're pleased to align with Seagate for their hard drive expertise as the new SAS 1TB drive is added to the HP portfolio of Midline drives. These drives will provide the 'pennies per GB economics' of SATA Midline with additional performance as well as the dual port capability our external storage customers demand."

The Barracuda ES.2 hard drive with SAS is optimized for business-critical and nearline enterprise storage environments that demand native enterprise host compatibility. This means no SATA interposer card costs and complexity, along with all the advantages including dual-port, full duplex capability and a host of enterprise class features for high system-level performance and reliability.

Seagate's PowerTrim(TM) technology is integrated into the Barracuda ES.2 drive family and dynamically manages drive power consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim technology, the Barracuda ES.2 drive addresses the IT dilemma facing energy-constrained data centers by delivering a 20% reduction in overall drive power consumption and a best-in-class 55% reduction in watts-per-gigabyte. And moving to SAS gives customers up to 38% improvement in IOPs-per-Watt over SATA.

The Barracuda ES.2 drive family's robust features stand out in performance, reliability, capacity, and energy efficiency. Among them is its new RVFF(TM) (Rotational Vibration Feed Forward) system, designed to sustain performance in densely-packed multi-drive systems. The Barracuda ES.2 drive also boosts reliability with an industry-best unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better than desktop class drives and a 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failure at full 24 x 7 data availability.

The Barracuda ES.2 drive family operates at 7,200-rpm spin speeds, delivers average seek times of 8.5ms, and delivers up to 1TB of capacity with other models available in 500GB and 750GB. It includes Seagate's industry-leading five-year limited warranty.

For more information about Seagate's Barracuda ES.2 family of products, visit http://www.seagate.com/.

About Seagate

Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disc drives and storage solutions, providing products for a wide-range of applications, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagate's business model leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, with the goal of being the time-to-market leader 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 http://www.seagate.com/.

Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. Barracuda and PowerTrim are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or one of its affiliated companies in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. When referring to hard drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes. Your computer's operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions, and thus will not be available for data storage. Quantitative usage examples for various applications are for illustrative purposes. Actual quantities will vary based on various factors, including file size, file format, features and application software. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications.