Continuing its trend-setting postion, Seagate has introduced the 10,000-RPM Cheetah family , the industry's highest random I/O transaction peformance disc drive available today. High-speed Cheetah drives incorporate innovative technology such as MR heads, a PRML channel and ultrahigh-performance embedded servo. The 10K RPM family provides unmatched performance for demanding application platforms such as workstations, network file servers and enterprise-wide serviers. This Cheetah is the superior solution for nonlinear video editing and graphics-visualization requirements and transaction-intensive business applications such as banking or reservation systems.

Seagate's Cheetah family of disc drives, available at 4.55- and 9.1- Gbyte capacity points, rely on the latest interface technology in order to deliver and maintain leading-edge performance to the rest of the system. For applications that require a hot-plug solution, all disc power, I/O and configuration connections have been incorporated into an 80-pin BlindMate single connector attachment that supports both 8- and 16- bit parallel UltraSCSI with Single-Ended or Differnetial options. Both UltraSCSI and Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) versions of Cheetah disc drives are available for users who demand the highest in throughput performance.

With UltraSCSI, parallel storage technology is extended to provide burst transfer rates of up to 40 Mbytes/second of sustained throughput. The drives are available in the most popular versions of this interface, including combinations of narrow, wide, single-connector attachment (SCA), and differential UltraSCSI. FC-AL goes one step further by raising serial interface performance to up to 100 Mbytes/second per loop, with up to two loops connected to each device, delivering high reliability and data availability to subsystems. This unprecedented performance rate can be sustained on links up to 10 kilometers in length, with up to 126 devices in a single chain.

By rotating at 10,000 RPM, the average latency time is reduced to 2.99 msec, nearly a 40 percent improvement over 7,200-RPM drives. Latency measures the amount of time necessary on average to rotate a platter to the point where the head is positioned at the beginning of the data stream that will be read. The Cheetah drive naturally provides a low latency rate due to its high spin rate.

The 10K RPM family's high-formatted data transfer rate of 11.3 to 16.8 Mbytes per second is unsurpassed in the industry and provides a superior solution for high data-rate applications such as digital A/V. The 10K RPM drives uses Seagate's exclusive Advanced SCSI Architecture II (ASA II) technology, which streamlines the internal architecture, dramatically increasing drive performance. Fully compatible with all industry-standard SCSI implementations and common across all Barracuda, Hawk and Elite families, ASA II facilitates easy product and cross platform migration when capacity or performance requreiments change. The rotational-position seek/sort (RPS) feature of ASA II maximizes performance in random-tagged enviroments by selecting the data block closest to the read/write head, thus eliminating unnecessary disc rotation time.

The 10K RPM family uses a programmable multisegmented cache that enables dramatic throughput increases in multiuser or multitasking environments. This 512-Kbyte RAM buffer (2,048 Kbyte optional) can be divided into as many as 16 equal segments for independent read and write data caching.