Seagate Ships Its One Millionth 15K-rpm Cheetah Disc Drive

In just over a year since bringing the world's first 15K-rpm disc drive to market, Seagate today announced it has shipped its one-millionth 15K-rpm disc drive. As the first-to-market 15K-rpm drive, the Cheetah X15 established a new standard for performance applications and subsequently took over the high end of the Enterprise storage market. While waiting for competitors to emerge with their own first 15K offerings, Seagate released its second-generation Cheetah X15-36LP, a disc drive that has been validated as the world's fastest by the industry's most respected media outlets.

"Market acceptance and adoption of 15K-rpm drives has been significantly greater than that of 10K-rpm drives, with Seagate's 15K Cheetah seeing wide integration by some of the largest OEMs," said David Reinsel, research manager at IDC. "A large percentage of these OEMs deliver storage solutions that can be centrally managed and provide a high level of IOPS per square foot, which plays to the strength of 15K-rpm drives."

"As the costs of implementing and managing complex storage solutions have increased, having fewer drives to manage translates into lower storage administration costs," said Sherman Black, vice president, Business Development, Enterprise and Personal Storage. "Because fewer 15K-rpm drives are needed to achieve the same system performance levels provided by other drives, and total ownership costs are reduced, 15K-rpm Cheetah disc drives are the best choice for performance applications. Many of Seagate's leading customers such as Compaq, Dell, and HP recognize this need and are building systems based on these requirements demanded by their own customers."

The second-generation Cheetah X15-36LP not only delivers fast time-to-data performance with seek times at 3.6 ms and latencies of 2.0 ms, but the maximum average operating power is also lower than last-generation's 10K drives. This translates into worry-free system upgrades that require no infrastructure changes while also providing the highest levels of reliability. The Cheetah X15-36LP also delivers whisper-quiet acoustic levels, as low as 3.5 Bels at idle. As a result of the Cheetah X15-36LP's performance leadership and value over 10K-rpm drives, IT administrators are enjoying the benefits of managing systems with fewer drives. Fewer drives not only means lower system hardware costs, it also translates into greater overall system reliability, less space required (more IOPS/ft2), lower total system power and cooling requirements, and lower IT administration cost.

For more information about Seagate's entire family of products including its award-winning Cheetah disc drives, visit www.seagate.com.

About Seagate
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 and Server Appliances. 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

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