SEAGATE RAISES 3.5-INCH HARD DISC PERFORMANCE/CAPACITY STANDARDS WITH THIRD
GENERATION OF BARRACUDA DRIVES

New 8- and 4- and 2-Gbyte versions of Seagate's award-winning 7,200-rpm
line use MR heads, PRML read channel and leading-edge interface
technologies to achieve performance required for a wide range of systems
and applications

SCOTTS VALLEY, CALIF. -- May 30, 1995 -- Seagate Technology is launching a
third generation of its highly-acclaimed Barracuda line of 7,200-rpm
3.5-inch disc drives with new 8- , 4- and 2-Gbyte versions that are the
first among Seagate's broad spectrum of drives to combine magnetoresistive
(MR) heads, partial response/maximum likelihood (PRML) read channel
electronics and today's fastest system interfaces, UltraSCSI and Fibre
Channel.

The Barracuda 8 and the inch-high 4- and 2-Gbyte Barracuda 4LP drives
provide OEMs, VARs and distributors with a complimentary set of
high-performance disc storage products for a wide range of applications.
Each of the drives will be available with one of two new high-performance
industry-standard interface versions: the 40 Mbyte/sec UltraSCSI or the
200 Mbyte/sec Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) serial peripheral
interface. The MR head, PRML channel and embedded-servo technologies used
in the new Barracudas enable disc drive performance and storage capacities
necessary for the latest breeds of engineering workstations, network
system servers, mainframes and supercomputers. Typical applications in
these environments include professional audio/video editing and playback,
computer-aided design and manufacturing, on-line transaction processing
and professional imaging.

"Seagate is recognized in the industry as being a leader in the development
and delivery of data technology products that our customers demand," said
Bernie Carballo, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at
Seagate. "These new drives are yet another example of how we leverage our
technology and experience into products that allow us to sustain our
dominance of this segment of the disc drive market."

Each of the new Barracudas feature 8-millisecond average seek times and
4.17 ms latencies (as a result of the 7,200 rpm spindle speed). The
drives' PRML digital read channels support internal data rates of up to
120 Mbits/sec. All of the Barracuda drives use a 512-Kbyte cache for data
buffering, which can segment itself into as many as 16 partitions to
provide optimal read and write performance. The combination of those
performance features with industry-standard UltraSCSI and FC-AL make the
new Barracudas among the fastest performers in the industry. Both
interfaces are built upon

Seagate's field-proven Advanced SCSI Architecture II (ASA II), a feature
designed to reduce controller overhead and raise overall drive
performance. "When the award-winning Barracuda was first launched in 1993,
it set the standard for high performance," said Don Colton, Seagate's vice
president of Product Line Management and Marketing. "The success of the
Barracuda family has established these 7,200-rpm products as the new
standard for mainstream server and workstation applications. The Barracuda
8 and 4LP products, along with Seagate's new 5,400-rpm Hawk 2XL drives,
cover the entire spectrum of performance applications."

"Performance has become an important differentiator in high-capacity
drives," said Crawford del Prete, senior industry analyst at International
Data Corp. "As 5,000-plus-rpm disc drives are becoming more pervasive on
desktop systems, server and performance workstation platforms are moving
to the 7,200-rpm performance level. Seagate is well positioned to
capitalize on this market transition."

The Barracuda 8 and 4LP families of drives support hot-plug SCSI and
Blind-Mate single connector (SCA-II) standards, making them ideal for RAID
(redundant array of independent discs) applications. These features enable
connection or disconnection of the drive to an operational array with no
corruption of data or power transients, as well as easy integration into a
RAID backplane by eliminating cabling complexity. SCAM Plug-n-Play Level 2
is fully supported by each of the new Barracudas, providing automatic ID
configuration between the drive and the host system. This removes the need
to manually configure the Barracuda in a multi-peripheral RAID
environment.

The new Barracudas all have one-million-hour MTBF (mean time between
failure) ratings and come with a five-year limited warranty. The drives
also incorporate industry-standard Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting
Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) as a means of anticipating drive failures,
allowing system OEMs to alert users if a drive's data is in jeopardy,
avoiding potential data loss. Evaluation units of the 8.7-Gbyte ST18771
Barracuda 8 and the 4.3-Gbyte ST34371 and 2.1-Gbyte ST32171 Barracuda 4LP
drives are scheduled for availability in the third calendar quarter of
1995. Production quantities are scheduled for availability in the fourth
quarter.

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