As it continues
to roll out its broad new line-up of disc drive products to the global
computing market, Seagate Technology announced that it has
garnered an industry-leading 37% market share worldwide for Serial ATA (SATA)
disc drives in the second calendar quarter of 2005. At the Intel Developer
Forum this week in San Francisco, Seagate is demonstrating its
latest SATA 3Gbit/second NCQ hard drives with a Silicon Image port multiplier
and enclosure. Port multipliers provide expansion from one Serial ATA port to
up to 15 SATA devices to enable low-cost bulk storage for archival, nearline
and network-attached environments.
“The growing demand for more gigabytes and terabytes, from consumers to
the enterprise, means a big need for low cost-per-gigabyte storage that
delivers higher performance, reliability and scalability,” said Jeff Loebbaka,
vice president of Global Marketing at Seagate. “Seagate continues to meet
these needs with a suite of disc drives across desktop, notebook, consumer
electronics, and nearline enterprise applications that have lead the
industry’s transition to Serial ATA technology.”
Powering Seagate’s market leadership are its Barracuda 7200-RPM SATA disc
drive family with Native Command Queuing (NCQ), a technology that increases
performance and disc drive reliability by optimizing the way the drive
processes data. Seagate was the first company to introduce NCQ on SATA hard
drives.
Seagate recently began shipping its Momentus 5400-RPM and 7200-RPM
notebook drives with the SATA interface and soon will introduce the company’s
first eSATA drive. eSATA is up to six times faster than existing external
storage solutions with USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 interfaces, providing external
data backup and protection at internal speeds up to 3 Gbit/second. Combined
with an external RAID array, eSATA provides scalable fast external data
storage for desktop PCs.
For enterprise applications, Seagate will begin shipping the NL35 Series
SATA disc drive, a high-capacity enterprise-ready drive for cost-effective
nearline storage. And later this year, the company will further expand its
SATA offerings with the introduction of the Barracuda 7200.9 3 Gbit/second
SATA hard drive. For more information about Seagate’s SATA technology and
drives, visit http://www.seagate.com/products/interface/sata .
Serial ATA is designed to replace parallel ATA technology and deliver a
10-year storage roadmap to 6 Gbit/second. All Seagate SATA drives are
compatible with Serial ATA 2.5, the latest SATA specification. Serial ATA 2.5
integrates Serial ATA 1.0, all the optional advanced specifications and years
of errata into a single document.
Seagate is a founding member of the Serial ATA International Organization
(SATA-IO), the group responsible for developing and driving the adoption of
SATA specifications such as native command queuing (NCQ), Hot Plug, Staggered
Spin-up, and SATA 3Gb/s. Seagate SATA marketing manager Joni Clark is
marketing chairwoman for the organization and Seagate senior I/O product
planning manager Marc Noblitt is on the group’s board of directors.
