Seagate today demonstrated the industry's first full-speed native Serial ATA hard drive technology, in form factor and ready to integrate into future Seagate products. Seagate's breakthrough design is the first to use on-board, native Serial ATA technology that does not need to translate incoming Serial ATA signals into Parallel ATA protocols. This ensures the design can provide the full 150-Mbytes-per-second Serial ATA transfer speed, with no added overhead or performance penalty. Seagate is also the first to design in single-chip functions that previously required a physical layer chip, link and transport layer chip, and AT controller chip. Today's demonstration at the Intel Developer Forum represents the final step toward a future of faster, simpler, more cost-effective ATA disc drive technology.

"As the first to develop fully native Serial ATA technology, Seagate proves again it is ahead of the curve," said Mark Geenen, analyst at TrendFocus. "Seagate continues to demonstrate the industry's most advanced Serial ATA designs - and it's significant that they are showing the only entirely native solution. Today's final breakthrough illustrates to customers that Seagate is on track to deliver Serial ATA as planned."

"We worked hard to develop full-speed native Serial ATA technology for one reason: to give our customers greater design freedom and a whole new roadmap to performance," said Brian Dexheimer, Seagate executive vice president, Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. "And we're doing that in a way that no one else has. Because we've developed a truly native Serial ATA technology, our customers' products will benefit from the fastest, most efficiently built Serial ATA hard drives - with no extra overhead, reduced performance or excess components. Seagate keeps pushing boundaries to enable new personal storage applications."

By its third generation, Serial ATA will transfer data at an amazing 600 Mbytes per second - six times faster than the current ATA standard - and allow more flexible and intelligent systems. Its speed combined with simpler cabling, hot-pluggability, and upcoming superset functions will enable a fantastic future of data-intensive and entertainment-heavy content delivered via PCs, home network hubs and Consumer Electronics devices.

Seagate expects to ship Serial ATA hard drive products as leading chip providers begin shipping Serial ATA discrete host controllers on add-in cards and motherboards. Together, these products will enable the PC and Consumer Electronics industries to begin a transition to Serial ATA products this year. Allowing a simple and cost-effective transition, Serial ATA provides a cost structure similar to Parallel ATA, and is 100-percent backward compatible with legacy Ultra ATA/100 software and drivers.

Seagate has played a key role in the two-year effort to bring Serial ATA to market as the successor to the Ultra ATA/100 interface. Seagate is a leader in technology development and invests more in Research and Development than all other independent hard drive companies combined. Seagate is the number one provider of ATA, SCSI and Fibre Channel disc drive technology.