NetCell Corporation Introduces the Blazing Fast REVOLUTION Storage Processing Board with PCI Express

Business Wire, March 2, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO -- NetCell Corporation Sets the New Standard in Media Storage Management for Consumers with REVOLUTION, the Industry's First Single Lane PCI Express Storage Processing Board for Serial ATA Applications

NetCell, the world's leader in media storage processors, today announced the REVOLUTION Storage Processing Board with PCI Express (PCIe), the industry's first three-port and five-port Serial ATA (SATA) Storage Processing Boards using the single lane (1X) PCI Express interface. The addition of PCI Express opens up the bandwidth and allows the speed to increase over 60%{a) compared with 32-bit PCI, equal to reading over 1000 more digital pictures/minute. Specifically designed to overcome the limitations of traditional drive configurations and provide a solution for today's demanding media storage requirements, NetCell's REVOLUTION family of storage processing boards delivers high-end performance and video broadcast-class data protection with consumer market-level ease-of-use and affordability.

"The REVOLUTION family of storage processing boards sets a new standard for storage management," said Andy Mills, President and CEO of NetCell. "By combining the fast speed data transfer rates of Serial ATA (SATA) with the high bandwidth of PCI Express (PCIe) in a single board we've created the ultimate storage solution for system builders and consumers."

Providing both three and five Serial ATA port options, the REVOLUTION delivers multiple levels of performance and protection options to the consumer, providing the industry's only true hardware RAID 0, 1, 3 and JBOD storage arrays. Using NetCell's patented SyncRAID technology, the REVOLUTION family of storage processing boards offers true plug-and-play simplicity by enabling a completely driverless installation to Windows XP, 2000 and 2003 environments, and easy integration into Linux environments.

The REVOLUTION Storage Processing Board with PCI Express utilizes NetCell's Revolution Media Storage Processor (MSP), a highly integrated RISC processor which uses 64-bit data paths to manage and accelerate the system's storage requirements while freeing the host CPU for other processing tasks. The Revolution MSP integrates a patented 100% hardware based "on-the-fly" XOR engine which eliminates read-write cycles to dramatically increase storage processing performance as compared to bandwidth intensive, host or embedded software-based solutions. The integrated SDRAM controller also allows board manufacturers to provide expandable on-board L2 cache configurations from 8MB up to 512MB to optimize solutions for different price and performance points.

NetCell REVOLUTION Storage Processing Boards are being demonstrated at the IDF Forum at booth 520 and will be available this Spring through NetCell's partners XFX and PNY. For more information about these or other NetCell media storage processor products please visit www.netcell.com.

About NetCell Corporation

NetCell is a privately held fabless semiconductor company that develops media storage processors for the ATA and SATA host bus adapter, server, PC, workstation and embedded storage markets. Using a unique patented architecture for writing and reading from multiple disk drives in parallel, NetCell enables a new class of storage product that advances the state of the art for mainstream hard drive storage applications, delivering enterprise-class reliability with better performance, lower cost, and plug-and-play simplicity. Storage products based on NetCell's technology will be aimed at next-generation entertainment PCs and graphics workstations used in media-intensive applications with rigorous performance demands. For more information please visit www.netcell.com.

(a) Results were produced with an Intel D915GAV motherboard with both PCI and PCI-e(1 lane) connectors. The 5 drives used in an XL-5 array configuration were 200GB, 7200RPM DiamondMax10(TM) hard disk drives from Maxtor Corporation.