Nov 02, 1998
People want fast, reliable access to the increasing amount of information that they depend on, said Brian Dexheimer, senior vice president of Desktop Marketing and Product Line Management. With over 17 Gbytes of capacity combined with Seagate's renowned ease-of-integration, the Medalist 17240 offers best-in-class performance and quality. Evolving from many generations of successful technology, the Medalist's reliability benefits from the experience gained in designing and manufacturing more than 100 million Desktop disc drives.
Combining industry-leading 9-millisecond average seeks, a 512KB buffer, and an internal transfer rate up to 188 Mbits/sec, the exceptional performance of the Medalist 17240 benefits users of the most demanding applications. The drives feature Seagate's patented ID-less sector format that makes available more than 480KB (>93 percent) of the 512KB data buffer for user data, enhancing user performance. The drives transfer data at a rate of up to 33 Mbytes/second via the Ultra ATA interface. With capacity points of 17.2 Gbytes, 12.9 Gbytes, 10.2 Gbytes, 8.4 Gbytes, and 4.3 Gbytes, these drives provide the performance needed for virtual CD applications, rendering and animation, computer-based training, movies, internet caching and other entertainment and business applications.
The Medalist 17240 family also includes the latest improvements for product robustness and resistance to nonoperational shock. These include the supplemental mechanical latch leveraged from the Medalist Pro family, an improved actuator design, and other internal mechanical improvements. Its excellent acoustics follow the standard set by previous Medalist products. The Medalist 17240 specifies a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) rating of 400,000 power-on hours, and comes with a standard, three-year limited warranty.
The Medalist 17240 also marks the expansion of Seagate's innovative SeaShield System to include new features that shield users' information from common problems. The SeaShield System now includes:
Medalist drives also include many data integrity enhancements as part of the SeaShield System: S.M.A.R.T. capabilities have been upgraded to level III, which can both predict and prevent problems. Seagate's Error Correction Code (E.C.C.) provides 72-bit on-the-fly hardware correction for excellent performance and 144-bit firmware correction for maximum data recovery. Improved thermal asperity recovery, continuous background defect scanning, and Safe Sparing combine to identify and eliminate defects with no measurable performance effects. All of these features provide excellent data reliability on the Medalist product families.
Seagate has also recently instituted a Web-based diagnostic tool to help users avoid returning a healthy disc drive for non-drive related problems such as viruses, corrupted file systems, and hardware conflicts. The diagnostic is simple to use and enables users to identify and solve some common non-disc-related system problems.
CTUs are scheduled to be available this quarter. The drives are scheduled to be in volume production in the first calendar quarter, 1999. The Medalist 17240 platform will offer the Ultra ATA/66 interface when compatible chip sets become available in volume from leading motherboard logic suppliers.
Seagate Technology, Inc. (NYSE:SEG) is a leading provider of technology and products enabling people to store, access, and manage information. The Company is committed to providing best-in-class products to help people get information when, where and how they want it. Seagate is the world's largest manufacturer of disc drives, magnetic discs and read-write heads, an innovator in tape drives, and a leading developer of Enterprise Information Management software. Seagate can be found around the globe and on the World Wide Web at http://www.seagate.com. For automated news, stock and financial information by phone, dial toll-free 877-SEG-NYSE. Outside the U.S. and Canada, dial 760-704-4368.
Seagate and Seagate Technology are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology, Inc. Medalist, SeaShield and DiscWizard are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology, Inc. or one of its subsidiaries. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
This release contains forward-looking statements relating to shipment and delivery of the Medalist 17240 platform and the Ultra ATA/66 interface. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and entail various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the ability of the Company to successfully develop and market the Medalist 17240 platform and the Ultra ATA/66 interface. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date thereof.
