Storage: Western Digital Announces One of Industry's First Ultra ATA/66 Hard Drives, the WD Caviar 13.0 GB, With Leading Time-to-Market 4.3 GB Per Platter Areal Density Outperforms competitive products by 25 to 35 percent - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Nov 2, 1998

Bringing one of the industry's first Ultra ATA/66 interface hard drives to market, Western Digital Corp. Monday introduced a 13.0 GB, three-platter, Ultra ATA/66 hard drive. The WD Caviar 13.0 GB hard drive incorporates WD's exclusive Data Lifeguard(TM) feature which protects end-user data by automatically detecting, isolating, and repairing possible problem areas on the hard drive before data loss can occur.

Combined with the Data Lifeguard protection system, the new Ultra ATA/66 interface provides end users with the maximum data reliability in hard drives today. Evaluation units are now available, with production of the WD Caviar 13.0 GB hard drive commencing this month. The capacities of this new platform range from 4.3 GB to 13.0 GB. The estimated retail street price of the WD Caviar 13.0 GB is $339. The new hard drive carries a three-year limited warranty. "With the dramatic increase in areal density growth in the past several years, time-to-market and volume-to-market execution has become mandatory for all drive makers," said John Monroe, chief analyst for rigid disk drives at Dataquest. "In spite of a recent trend toward ultra-low cost storage options, performance and quality remain crucial differentiators in OEM acceptance of new hard drive products." "The testing that has been done in our exclusive F.I.T. Lab has shown that the WD Caviar outperforms similar competitive offerings by 25 to 35 percent under Windows 95 and Windows 98 as shown by Ziff-Davis' Winbench(R) 98 Version 1.0(a)," said John Burger, vice president of marketing for Western Digital. "Leadership on key attributes of performance and quality should allow Western Digital to garner primary supplier positions at top PC OEMs." The WD Caviar 13.0 GB hard drive has an average read seek time of 9.5 ms that combines with a 5400 RPM rotational spindle speed for today's high performance requirements. The drive supports Mode 4 PIO (programmable input/output), Mode 2 DMA (direct memory access), Ultra ATA/33 and Ultra ATA/66. Ultra ATA/66 allows data to transfer at speeds of up to 66.6 MB/s, doubling the data transfer rate of 33.3 MB/s. Data Lifeguard is an enhancement feature of S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). The exclusive WD feature is always enabled and works independently of S.M.A.R.T. S.M.A.R.T. is a technology that predicts possible system down time by warning the user of potential hard drive failure when enabled. The Ultra ATA/66 interface enhances data integrity through improved timing margins and the use of Cyclical Redundancy Check (CRC), a data protection system that helps assure the integrity of transferred data. The interface allows host computers to send and retrieve faster, removing bottlenecks associated with data transfers. The WD Caviar 13.0 GB is packaged with MicroHouse's EZ-Drive, version 9.09W software utility. This utility allows end users to break the 8.4 GB hard drive limitation on some traditional system BIOSs. The use of EZ-Drive, version 9.09W, will support the full capacity of drives greater than 8.4 GB by overcoming operating systems and system BIOS limitations, while offering the end users ease-of-installation and the ability to easily copy data from their existing drive. Western Digital is a leader in information storage products and services. The company designs and manufactures hard drives for personal and enterprise-wide computing, and markets them to leading systems manufacturers and selected resellers under the Western Digital brand name. Western Digital is the first Fortune 500, multinational company to have been awarded company-wide ISO 9001 registration, linking all WD organizations with a consistent global standard for quality processes. The company was founded in 1970 and has long been noted for its storage and end-market systems-level design knowledge. The company's home page can be found at http://www.westerndigital.com. (a) Western Digital used Winbench 98 Version 1.0 Business Disk Winmark on a Pentium II, 300 MHz Intel LX chipset, 32 MB of RAM, WD Caviar 13.0 GB hard drive and Microsoft Windows 95 OEM SR-2. The tests were performed without independent verification by Ziff-Davis and that Ziff-Davis makes no representations or warranties as to the result of the test.