Seagate Extends Lead in Capacity-Boosting Perpendicular Recording Technology – Surges Past 16 Million Mark in PMR Hard Drive Shipments

    Vaulting to a clear leadership position with the new technology that brings soaring storage capacities to computers and consumer electronics devices, Seagate Technology has announced that it has become the first company to break the 15 million mark in shipments of hard drives built on a perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), shipping more than 16 million of the drives.

    “Seagate is the world’s leading supplier of perpendicular recording technology, with an expected 75 percent of its shipments of this type by year end 2007,” said Krishna Chander, senior analyst of Storage Systems at iSuppli Corp.

    Seagate’s proven perpendicular recording technology promises to give rise to 2.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte laptop PC hard drives in the next three to five years. Seagate’s first hard drive to feature the technology — Momentus(R) 5400.3, a 2.5-inch notebook drive with the world’s highest capacity of 160GB — shipped in December 2005. In the months that followed, Seagate introduced perpendicular hard drives across its desktop, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail branded platforms.

    “For those wondering if Seagate was bluffing when it announced intentions for a swift migration to perpendicular recording — the answer is clear that the company is flexing its technical muscles,” John Kim, vice president of market research firm TrendFOCUS, reported upon the launch of Momentus 5400.3. “With a solid lead in areal density in the desktop, the latest announcement places Seagate atop another segment in technical terms. Seagate appears to be making — and breaking — the rules in a highly competitive market sector.”

    No other drive maker has matched the breadth of Seagate’s perpendicular products, which include the Barracuda(TM) 7200.10, the only 3.5-inch desktop hard drive to deliver up to 750GB of capacity.

    Nearly one year after the product began to ship, Seagate remains the only hard drive provider to deliver that capacity. Seagate also offers up to 750GB of capacity with the Barracuda ES enterprise drive family, the DB35 Series for digital video recorders, the SV35 Series for the surveillance market, the company’s new family of FreeAgent(TM) data movers, and its Maxtor(R)-branded network and external storage and backup solutions. The introduction of the 750GB models marked the biggest capacity jump in the 50-year history of hard drives — a 50 percent leap from the previous high of 500GB.

    Seagate’s Lyrion(TM) Series drive, also built using perpendicular recording, delivers an industry-leading 60GB of capacity in a single-platter 1.8-inch hard drive for portable handheld devices.

    In the mission-critical enterprise space, Seagate’s perpendicular recording leadership has enabled new performance and capacity heights. Perpendicular recording has provided a greater range of capacity choices for Seagate’s family of Savvio(R) 2.5-inch enterprise drives, available now in both 10K- and 15K-RPM models. The industry’s first perpendicular enterprise drive, the Cheetah(R) 15K.5, delivers 15K-RPM spin speeds with the highest transaction performance while doubling the top capacity of its previous generation design to 300GB.

    Top Publications Laud Seagate’s Perpendicular Recording Technology

    The Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive and Seagate’s perpendicular recording technology have won high honors from leading technology publications. The 7200-RPM hard drive won PC Magazine’s Annual Technical Excellence and PC World’s 2007 Most Innovative Products awards. Tom’s Hardware, a top online reviews site, named the Barracuda 7200.10 one of its Top 10 Hardware Releases of 2006, and Electronic Design Magazine listed the drive among its Hot 100 Products of 2006. The magazine also honored the drive with its Best Design of the Year award.

    Seagate is the only hard drive maker to deliver perpendicular recording technology across desktop, notebook, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail hard drives. The technology represents a shift from a half-century of technological precedent to a new way of recording data to the disk media, standing data bits vertically onto the disc media, rather than horizontally on the surface as with traditional longitudinal recording, to deliver new levels of hard drive data density, capacity and reliability. The new data orientation also increases drive throughput without increasing spin speed by allowing more data bits to pass under the drive head in the same amount of time.

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