Maxtor Extends Atlas Enterprise Drive Family to Include New Serial Attached SCSI Interface

(Auszug aus der Pressemitteilung)

MILPITAS, Calif., March 28 – Maxtor Corporation

(NYSE: MXO) announced today that the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface is
available on qualification units of the award-winning Atlas(R) 10K V and Atlas
15K II drives. Maxtor has shipped qualification units to top OEMs as well as
over 30 system manufacturers. Qualification units shipped include the
industry’s first 300GB and highest capacity SAS drive, the Atlas 10K V.

SAS is the next generation of the SCSI interface, developed to improve
storage system performance, scalability, and availability and extend the
capabilities of today’s parallel SCSI disk drives. One of the most significant
benefits of SAS technology is that the SAS system architecture allows 10,000
and 15,000 RPM, 3.5-inch Atlas SAS drives to be integrated with Serial ATA
(SATA) drives such as Maxtor(R) MaXLine(TM) drives in the same enclosure. This
capability, which Maxtor calls Serial in a Box(TM), provides unprecedented
flexibility and scalability. SAS enclosures can serve as universal building
blocks for constructing a data center’s storage infrastructure to meet
nearline, midline, and online data requirements.

Featuring a data transfer rate of up to 3.0Gb/s, SAS allows for higher
levels of performance and adds a second port to the hard drive to enhance
system availability and reliability. This second port provides two separate
data paths to the drive. Both the Atlas 15K II and Atlas 10K V drives with the
SAS interface feature dual ports, enabling the design of highly-available
enterprise storage systems.

„As one of the leaders in developing SAS, Maxtor is pleased to be well
into the qualification process with key customers and is preparing to begin
shipping Atlas SAS drives next quarter,“ said Brendan Collins, vice president
of marketing, core products at Maxtor. „Maxtor maintains its commitment to
delivering a complete line of 10,000 and 15,000 RPM, 3.5-inch enterprise-class
drives with Ultra320 SCSI and SAS interfaces to support customers‘ current and
future system designs.“

The Atlas 15K II SAS drive features capacities of 36, 73 and 147GB and a
15,000 RPM rotational speed. The drive offers a maximum sustained transfer
rate of 98MB/sec and average seek times as fast as 3.0ms. The Atlas 15K II was
recently ranked as the world’s fastest drive by independent testing site
Storagereview.com.

The Atlas 10K V SAS drive features capacities of 73, 147 and 300GB and a
10,000 RPM rotational speed. The drive offers a maximum sustained transfer
rate of 89MB/sec and average seek times as fast as 4.0ms. Both the Atlas 15K
II and Atlas 10K V drives include a 16MB cache and are designed to the
specification of 1.4 million hours MTTF.

Maxtor is a founder of the SCSI Trade Association’s SAS initiative and has
been engaged with several leading component vendors to ensure compatibility of
Atlas SAS drives with components such as system backplanes and controllers
supplied by those vendors. For more information on SAS including technical
documentation and white papers visit http://www.maxtor.com/sas.