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Western Digital WD Raptor HD Certified With Intel Controller

Western Digital Corp announced recently that its enterprise-class WD Raptor 10,000 RPM, Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, offering reliability specifications such as 1.2 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) and a five-year warranty, has been certified compatible with the Intel RAID Controller SRCS14L SATA HBA (Host Bus Adapter) by both companies' test labs.

The two products are key ingredients in an enterprise SATA RAID storage system and are currently available today for systems builders and storage providers. A WD Raptor/Intel Taft system will be demonstrated at Western Digital's booth at CeBIT [Hall 20/Stand D06], Hannover, Germany, March 12-19, 2003.

"Serial ATA will enable relatively inexpensive drives to play a major role in enterprise storage applications," said John Monroe, a vice president and chief analyst with Gartner, the market research firm. "Leading companies are beginning to seriously consider multiple interface options in a diverse array of storage systems. By 2007, more than 30 percent of all hard disk drives configured in multi-user environments will incorporate serial ATA interfaces."

Western Digital tested and certified the compatibility of the WD Raptor hard drive and the Intel RAID Controller SRCS14L in its Functional Integrity Testing (FIT) lab. Intel Corp also tested and validated the compatibility of the two products.

The WD Raptor hard drive is the first SATA product available that is designed for the 24x7, high performance demands of enterprise applications, having specifications such as 1.2 million hours MTBF, 10,000 RPM, 5.2 milliseconds (ms) average seek time and a five-year warranty. It offers systems builders and storage providers a primary storage hard drive at approximately 30% less the cost of comparable SCSI products. Together with boards such as Intel's, WD Raptor hard drives offer a cost-effective enterprise-class system solution.

"Serial ATA drive technology combined with RAID implementation offers full-featured RAID data protection for an enterprise market at a lower cost per gigabyte," said Phil Brace, Intel Enterprise Platforms and Services Division, director of marketing.

The Intel RAID Controller SRCS14L provides full-featured RAID data protection for high-end desktops and entry-level servers. As one of the first hardware-based SATA RAID cards in the market and the first four-port, lowprofile adapter to use an I/O processor, the RAID controller SRCS14L enables system builders to implement robust SATA hardware RAID data protection in a rapid time-to-market and at a very low cost-per-megabyte.

"Intel's commitment to enterprise-class Serial ATA technology is an important factor for systems builders and storage providers," said Richard E. Rutledge, vice president of marketing for Western Digital. "We anticipate an increasingly wide adoption of SATA in servers and storage systems as the infrastructure builds."

About Western Digital

Western Digital, one of the storage industry's pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The Company produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that keep users' data close-at-hand and secure from loss.

Western Digital was founded in 1970. The Company's storage products are marketed to leading systems manufacturers and selected resellers under the Western Digital brand name. Visit the Investor section of the Company's Web site, www.westerndigital.com, to access a variety of financial and investor information.

Contact: Robert Blair, Investor Relations, 949-672-7834, robert.blair@wdc.com.