Seagate lets quick cats out of the bag

Seagate is having kittens - or at least delivering wild cats - with its new Cheetah disk drives, which it claims are the industry's fastest.

According to Seagate, the spindle speed of 10,000rpm gives the drives a high data transfer rate of 15Mb/s. Two versions are available: 4.55Gb and 9.1Gb.

Bernie Carballo, Seagate executive VP of worldwide sales and marketing, said: 'Seagate has continually set the standard for high performance disk drives. It was first to bring 5,400rpm rotational speeds to market with the Elite family, first to introduce 7,200rpm spindle speeds with the 3.5in Barracuda family, and it is the first to introduce 10,000rpm performance with the 3.5in Cheetah family.'

But evaluation units will not be available until Q1 1997 and products will not start shipping until Q2 1997.

The drives support Ultra Scsi and fibre channel-arbitrated loop, have a mean time between failure of one million hours and come with a five-year warranty.

Unisys has started shipping its Aquanta PCs with Seagate's 8Gb Atapi (IDE) interface minicartridge tape drive. Unisys is one of Seagate's first OEM tape drive deals. Unisys said it chose Seagate because it was the only manufacturer that could provide an 8Gb drive that fitted easily into the Aquanta's 5.25in drive bay.