CUPERTINO, Calif. May 7, 2013 — Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX), a worldwide leader in storage solutions, today announced its new portfolio of flash-memory solutions. The company took the wraps off its first client solid state drive (SSD) and its next-generation enterprise SSDs. Featuring the Seagate® 600 SSD, Seagate® 600 Pro SSD, and the Seagate® 1200 SSD, the new line of drives are engineered to deliver ultra-fast speed and high data integrity. Rounding out the portfolio, Seagate also announced the new Seagate® X8 Accelerator, a storage class memory PCIe card powered by Virident enabling the company to offer all key interfaces including SATA and SAS solutions.

Seagate 600 SSD: Faster Performance with 6Gb/s SATA
The ultimate laptop upgrade, the Seagate 600 SSD delivers faster boot up speeds, shorter application load times, and improved system responsiveness for the ultimate performance. Laptop users can boot up nearly four times faster and load applications more than two times faster than with a standard hard drive, greatly reducing the amount of wait time to access content¹.

"SSDs continue to be among the most popular product categories on Newegg.com as more consumers increasingly turn to them to deliver more speed, faster boot up times and superior performance," said Patrick Chung, vice president of global product management at Newegg. "Seagate's new line of SSDs, including the new 600 SSD, will be a great addition to our existing assortment. We're excited to introduce the new SSDs to our customers and look forward to continuing our strategic partnership with Seagate."
 
"Over the years, Seagate has been a valued partner contributing a vast array of storage solutions to our comprehensive selection of IT products," says Lionel Garcia, vice president at Tiger Direct. "Seagate's products are in high demand among our customers and we're excited to add their new SSD to our assortment. As consumer demand for greater speed and shorter boot up times continues to rise, the new 600 SSD will provide customers with the ultimate performance they crave."

Fast and as easy to install as a hard disk drive upgrade, the Seagate 600 SSD is available in multiple z-heights including an industry-first, diminutive 5mm-high drive making it ideal for most ultra-thin devices as well as standard laptop systems. The drive features up to 480GB of capacity and comes in a 2.5 form factor. It also incorporates a 6Gb/s SATA interface for fast data transfer rates and easy connection.

Seagate 600 Pro SSD--Fast Performance, Low Power with 6Gb/s SATA
A low power server and storage solution, the Seagate 600 Pro SSD is ideal for cloud system builders, hyperscale datacenters, cloud service providers, content delivery networks, and virtualized environments. An entry-level enterprise SATA SSD, the 600 Pro SSD combines fast performance and lower power delivering best-in-class performance efficiency and IOPS/watt value.

"By incorporating Seagate's SSD technology into our product offerings we are able to address customer demand for greater speed, short, consistent response times, and greater enclosure and power efficiencies," said Paul Poynter, CTO Rorke Data, an Avnet business unit. "As we continue to drive PC innovation in today's markets, we look forward to integrating this enterprise SSD technology into our Rorke product line providing our discerning customers with the ultimate in performance and value."
 
Engineered with efficiency in mind, the 600 Pro SSD features the industry's highest IOPS/watt to improve system performance while reducing power and cooling costs for transaction-hungry datacenters and cloud enterprise applications. Utilizing 2.8 watts typical operating power, the drive reduces energy by automatically adjusting the power consumption to workload I/O levels-- using less power for lighter workloads. The drive is also equipped with the intelligence to deliver high-data integrity, safeguarding against unexpected power loss and undetected corruption when a device is powered off.

The Seagate 600 Pro SSD is available with up to 480GB capacity and comes in 2.5-inch form factor. It is equipped with a 6Gb/s SATA interface for fast data transfer rates and easy connection to existing SATA infrastructure.

Seagate 1200 SSD-- Ultra-Fast Speed, Consistent Performance with 12Gb/s SAS
Designed for demanding enterprise storage and server applications with complex, write-intensive mixed workloads, such as high-performance computing and data analytics, the Seagate 1200 SSD delivers the ultimate in speed, consistent performance and the highest levels of data integrity.

Built to deliver ultra-fast data access, the drive uses algorithms that optimize performance for frequently accessed data by prioritizing which storage operations, reads or writes, occur first and optimizing where it is stored. The result is improved performance to help close the gap between processor and data access.
 
It incorporates a dual port 12Gb/s SAS connector providing 100 percent faster interface speed, over previous generations, for twice the I/O bandwidth while ensuring the highest level of reliability, availability and scalability. The drive is also backwards compatible with 6Gb/s SAS environments.
 
The 1200 SSD leverages Seagate's existing enterprise expertise and manufacturing excellence to deliver high levels of data integrity, manageability, testing and support. It also safeguards data against unexpected power loss and protects data from undetected, unintentional corruption.

The Seagate 1200 SSD is available with up to 800GB capacity and comes in either a 1.8-inch or 2.5 inch form factor.

Seagate X8 Accelerator-- Application Performance Turbocharged
The Seagate X8 Accelerator, powered by Virident, delivers memory-class performance and storage-class capacity with enterprise reliability and data integrity in a single, low profile PCIe card. Providing industry-leading performance, with up to 1.1 million IOPS, the X8 Accelerator boosts server performance with ultra-fast speed that is up to 2X faster than the closest competitor and closer to DRAM performance than storage.

Boasting high storage capacity (up to 2.2TB) in a small footprint (HHHL half height half length) the X8 Accelerator fits in any server. The card's x8 PCI Express Gen-2 interface enables it to deliver maximum application performance in database and virtualization applications such as Microsoft© SQL Server, Oracle Enterprise Server, MySQL, and VMware. For more information on Seagate's entire portfolio of flash memory products visit http://seagate.com/www/ssd/.

About Seagate
Seagate is a world leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions. Learn more at www.seagate.com.

Copyright 2013 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Wave logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. When referring to drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one thousand billion bytes. Your computer's operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions and will not be available for data storage. Actual data rates may vary depending on operating environment and other factors.

¹ As validated by Microsoft VTS for boot up speed and Intel SRMU for application load time.

Industry-leading, 2.5-inch, 12Gb/s SAS SSD family includes:

• High Endurance Ultrastar™ SSD800MH - sequential throughput of up to 1,200MB/s read and 750MB/s write; up to 145,000 read and 100,000 sustained write IOPS; up to 800GB; and the highest endurance rating at 25 full drive writes per day (DW/D) to support high-frequency trading and online transaction processing.
• Mainstream Endurance Ultrastar SSD800MM - sequential throughput of up to 1,200MB/s read and 700MB/s write; up to 145,000 read and 70,000 sustained write IOPS; up to 800GB; and a high endurance rating at 10 full DW/D to support online gaming, big data and cloud computing.
• Read Intensive Ultrastar SSD1000MR - sequential throughput of up to 1,200MB/s read and 700MB/s write; up to 145,000 read and 20,000 sustained write IOPS; up to 1,000GB (1TB); and an endurance rating at two full DW/D to support online audio/video streaming, cloud computing and other Internet applications.

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 9, 2013 - HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the industry's fastest and most advanced enterprise-class, multi level cell (MLC) SAS SSD family - the Ultrastar SSD800MH, Ultrastar SSD800MM and Ultrastar SSD1000MR. From the market share leader in enterprise SAS/FC SSDs, these HGST drives are the first to double today's SAS interface speed. Designed for the most demanding applications where "hot" data is accessed frequently, such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, online gaming, and big data analytics, HGST's new 12Gb/s SAS SSDs help increase input/output per second (IOPS) and improve response times to mission-critical data in cloud and traditional IT datacenters environments.

Enterprise-Class MLC SSDs - A Critical Enterprise Component
Increasingly in traditional IT and cloud hyperscale datacenters an application's high-end processing functions are stored on SSDs, which are then paired with high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) that store the bulk of that application's less dynamic content in tiered infrastructures. This mix of high-performance SSDs and high-performance and high-capacity enterprise-class HDDs deliver greater efficiencies of scale, improved asset utilization and help lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Enterprise-class SAS SSDs and HDDs are proving to be the preferred solution for datacenter architects who have ruled out client-level SATA SSDs and desktop-class HDD combinations, which may deliver a lower price; but also can result in lower system uptimes. Likewise, putting all types of data on a high-end PCIe only infrastructure is prohibitively expensive. Implementing a sound tiered storage strategy using HGST enterprise-class SSDs and HDDs can make a positive impact through improved service levels and cost savings. Using HGST's highly reliable, high-endurance enterprise-class SSDs rated with the industry's leading 2.0 million hours mean time between failure¹ (MTBF) specification can also help reduce current and long-term TCO as datacenter managers experience fewer failures, improved uptime, and receive the highest performance with improved latency and IOPS.

"SSDs along with high-performance and high-capacity HDDs are the main building blocks of choice for traditional IT and cloud hyperscale datacenters and represent a market that is expected to grow in excess of $16 billion by 2015," said Jeff Janukowicz research director, Solid State Drives and Enabling Technologies at IDC. "SSDs, such as HGST's new SAS SSD family, continue to improve generation to generation to meet today's enterprise workload requirements while driving down the price points to support high I/O applications."

New HGST Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSD Family: The Right Fit For High I/O Applications
As the first SSDs with 12Gb/s SAS, HGST continues to push performance limits. The new Ultrastar SSD800MH 12Gb/s SAS SSD delivers the highest sequential throughput with up to 1,200MB/s large block reads, and up to 750MB/s writes. It also delivers up to 145,000 read and 100,000 write IOPS, reaching speeds >100 times faster than HDDs, allowing rapid access to "hot" enterprise data for improved productivity and operational efficiency.

With this new generation, HGST has also improved its SSD "quality of service." Quality of service refers to how quickly and efficiently the SSD can manage and process reads and writes to the drive. Like lanes on a highway, too much data traffic can cause congestion and slow performance. In tier 0/1 enterprise applications such as high-frequency trading, every millisecond counts. As the industry leader in enterprise SSDs, HGST uses unique firmware and controller technology to significantly improve command completion time requirements. The overall result is a 50 percent improvement in latency, a 300 percent improvement in I/O per second (IOPS) writes, and a 2x - 3x faster throughput compared to the earlier generation Ultrastar SSD400S SSD. Common firmware and controller technology across HGST's enterprise-class SSD and HDD families also allows for seamless system integration and reduced qualification times.

Building solutions for the future, HGST's new SSD family comes with three endurance levels - high endurance, mainstream endurance and read-intensive endurance. Each 12Gb/s SAS SSD family delivers an optimal balance of performance, reliability, cost and endurance to meet the unique and diverse workload requirements of nearly any enterprise application. The new Ultrastar SSD800MH high-endurance SSD rates at 25 full drive writes per day (DW/D) for five years, ideal for high-frequency trading or online transaction processing. The Ultrastar SSD800MM mainstream endurance SSD rates at 10 DW/D for five years, ideal for applications such as online gaming, big data, and cloud computing. The read-intensive 1TB Ultrastar SSD1000MR SSD rates at two DW/D for five years, perfect for streaming audio/video, cloud computing and other Internet applications.

"LSI and HGST have achieved a number of key milestones, including compatibility testing of the fastest 12Gb/s SAS RAID controllers and SSDs, and are prepared to lead the industry transition and market adoption of the new 12Gb/s SAS interface standard," said Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager, RAID Storage Division, LSI Corporation. "As the preferred enterprise interface of the future, 12Gb/s SAS is essential to unleashing the full performance potential of SSD storage solutions to help datacenters and cloud environments contend with massive data growth and accelerate application performance. It is also backward compatible with 6Gb/s SAS for investment protection in current SAS infrastructures."

"Our Zebi storage arrays are specifically designed with de-duplication and compression in virtualized server and desktop environments where performance and capacity are critical. Using HGST's reliable, high-performance and high-capacity SSDs and HDDs, combined with our innovative Zebi technology, gives our customers the best balance of performance, capacity, features and price," said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing, Tegile Systems. "We're proud to say that our award-winning Zebi HA2800 storage array uses HGST's SAS SSDs, and we look forward to working with HGST on this new generation of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs to deliver even more performance and capacity to our customers."

"With the industry's highest SAS SSD performance, three endurance-level options, high-capacity and proven reliability, HGST offers the most-advanced 12Gb/s SAS SSDs for the enterprise where it is critical SSDs and HDDs integrate seamlessly in tiered storage environments for optimal efficiency," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST. "Combining more than 50 years of design and qualification experience with proven HGST SAS implementation across interface hardware and firmware, HGST's new line of MLC SSDs provides simple, scalable and flexible solutions that ensure system compatibility and ease of integration into new or existing enterprise storage systems and designs."

Availability   HGST is currently qualifying its SSDs with select OEMs. Broader qualification samples are now available with channel distribution scheduled in June 2013. Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS self-encrypting SSD models are also available, which conform to the Trusted Computing Group's Enterprise A Security Subsystem Class encryption specification, helping customers reduce the costs associated with drive retirement and extend drive life by enabling repurposing of drives.

The Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSD family is targeted to achieve a 0.44 percent annual failure rate (AFR) or two million hour mean-time-between-failure (MTBF), representing HGST's continued product strength. They are backed by a five-year limited warranty, or the maximum petabytes written (based on capacity). Please visit http://www.hitachigst.com/solid-state-drives for more information.

About HGST
HGST (formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies or Hitachi GST), a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, innovative external storage solutions and services used to store, preserve and manage the world's most valued data. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives, HGST provides high-value storage for a broad range of market segments, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Personal Storage. HGST was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit the company's website at http://www.hgst.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to expected availability dates for HDD products. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, including changes in markets, demand, global economic conditions and other risks and uncertainties listed in Western Digital's recent SEC filings, to which your attention is directed. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak on as of the date hereof, and HGST/WD undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

¹ MTBF target is based on a sample, aggregate population of a drive family and is estimated by statistical measurements and acceleration algorithms under nominal operating conditions. MTBF ratings are not intended to predict an individual drive's reliability. MTBF does not constitute a warranty.

One GB is equal to one billion bytes, and one TB equals 1,000 GB (one trillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on operating environment and formatting.

Ultrastar is a registered trademark of HGST, a Western Digital Company. Western Digital, WD, and the WD logo are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.