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MAXTOR SHOWCASES ENGINEERING SAMPLES OF SAS DRIVES

Maxtor Corporation announced that it will show its first engineering sample units of its Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives at HP World 2003. This technology demonstration will show how Maxtor MaXLine Serial ATA (SATA) drives can be combined with Maxtor Atlas SAS drives in a single system enclosure, creating Serial storage in the box. The demonstration will take place August 12-14, 2003 in the Server Storage booth #443 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

Maxtor's HP World demonstration will highlight the differences and the compatibility of the two Serial interface technologies and the role each class of drive will play in the data center. The demo includes sample units of Maxtor MaXLine SATA drives and Atlas 10K RPM and 15K RPM SAS drives.

"With engineering demonstration units of our SAS drives, customers will be able to see the features that are designed into SAS drives such as the dual port connector in contrast to the single port connector that is present on today's parallel SCSI drives," said Joe DeRosa, senior director of marketing, Maxtor's Server Products Group. "In addition, customers will be able to see the common form factor and connectors that will enable system administrators to configure SAS systems with SAS or SATA disk drives."

Maxtor's MaXLine family of Serial ATA disk drives are the only Serial ATA disk drives designed for multi-user, 24 x 7 operation in low I/O storage applications. By combining these drives with SAS drives in the same storage system, IT managers will be able to support both near-line and high-transactional applications with a common storage enclosure.

"Storage systems based on Serial Attached SCSI will scale capacity and performance to meet the requirements of the most demanding enterprise applications while maintaining compatibility with Serial ATA disk drives," said Linus Wong, director of marketing for Adaptec's Storage Solutions Group. "Adaptec continues to work with technology leaders like Maxtor to drive Serial Attached SCSI development and bring the performance, flexibility and scalability benefits of the next-generation storage technology to our customers."

Maxtor recently announced it reached a SAS engineering milestone when it successful exchanged SAS data packets between two prototype devices. Building on the company's accomplishments in being first to market with the previous three generations of SCSI interfaces, Maxtor engineers were able to successfully initialize the target device, execute SCSI commands, and read and write data across the interface.

For more information on Serial Attached SCSI, please refer to the Maxtor Web site at:
http://www.maxtor.com/en/technologies/serial_attached_scsi/index.htm .