Serial ATA "Plugfest" Verifies Serial ATA Interoperability Industry-Wide

The first Serial ATA "plugfest," sponsored by Seagate, Intel Corporation, and Silicon Image, was a resounding success - test results presented today by participants at the Intel Developer Forum, Fall 2002 in San Jose confirmed that interoperability between Serial ATA components is better than 95 percent throughout the industry. The Serial ATA plugfest drew nearly 50 companies to Colorado last month, including manufacturers of cables, connectors, silicon, add-in cards, motherboards, hard drives and enclosures. More than 900 tests run on dozens of Serial ATA-equipped devices resulted in a success rate of greater than 95 percent, demonstrating a high degree of interoperability among devices using the new interface.

"The plugfest acts as a catalyst to bring companies working on Serial ATA products together in one place at one time to make it easy to quickly assess new product interoperability," said Marc Noblitt, Seagate manager of I/O planning. "As we begin to deploy Serial ATA 1.0 products into the market, it is critical that we, as industry suppliers, work together to ensure a smooth launch of Serial ATA into the user environment."

Along with basic compatibility testing like booting and OS loading, specific test programs were used to further evaluate Serial ATA equipment. Among the tests that performed were:

* Data transfer tests, geared at measuring how reliably data is transmitted and received

* Transmit eye pattern tests for both hosts and devices

* OOB hand shake protocol tests

* Common mode transient tests

The plugfest was open to all companies working on Serial ATA products - including system and motherboard vendors, hard drive vendors, cable vendors, silicon vendors, storage enclosure vendors, OS vendors, BIOS vendors, test tool vendors and others.

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. 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.