Seagate 2005 Annual Report Download - page 10

Table of Contents
primarily at facilities located in China, Singapore and Thailand. Also, through the acquisition of Maxtor, we have acquired a final assembly and
test manufacturing facility in Suzhou, China, significantly increasing our China-based manufacturing presence. We perform subassembly and
component manufacturing operations at our facilities in China, Malaysia, Northern Ireland, Singapore, Thailand, and in the United States, in
California and Minnesota. In addition, third parties manufacture and assemble components for us in various Asian countries, including China,
Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, and in Europe and the United States.
Products
We offer a broad range of disc drive products for the enterprise, desktop, mobile computing, consumer electronics and branded solutions
markets of the disc drive industry. While most of our products currently employ longitudinal recording technology, we were the first disc drive
manufacturer to announce perpendicular recording technology based products for all major markets described below, with products shipping
for revenue in the desktop, enterprise, mobile and branded solution markets during fiscal year 2006. We expect that by the end of fiscal year
2007, more than half of our disc drive unit shipments will be perpendicular recording technology based products.
We offer more than one product within each product family, and differentiate products on the basis of price/performance and form factor,
the dimensions of the disc drive, or capacity. Historically, our industry has been characterized by continuous and significant advances in
technology, which has contributed to rapid product life cycles; however, based upon the recent pace of new product introductions, we believe
that our industry is currently in a period in which the rate of increases in areal density, which is the storage capacity per square inch on a disc, is
lower than the rate of the last several years, resulting in longer product life cycles. We list below our main current product offerings.
Enterprise Storage
Cheetah SCSI/SAS/Fibre Channel Family . Our Cheetah 3.5-inch disc drives ships in 10,000 and 15,000 RPM and storage capacities
ranging from 36GB to 300GB. Commercial uses for Cheetah disc drives include Internet and e-commerce servers, data mining and data
warehousing, mainframes and supercomputers, department/enterprise servers and workstations, transaction processing, professional video and
graphics and medical imaging.
Savvio SCSI/SAS/Fibre Channel Family. Savvio, our 2.5-inch enterprise disc drive first introduced in fiscal year 2004, is designed to
enable space optimization, maximized performance and availability, ships in 10,000 RPM and in 36GB and 73GB capacities. This disc drive is
our first enterprise disc drive in the smaller 2.5-inch form factor and, as such, allows the installation of more disc drives per square foot, thus
facilitating faster access to data. We believe that end-user customers are increasingly adopting the smaller 2.5-inch form factor enterprise class
disc drives and in June 2006 we announced the next generation of our Savvio disc drive, a perpendicular recording technology based product
with increased capacity and improved power consumption, allowing improved space optimized enterprise storage systems.
Barracuda ES SATA Family . In June 2006, we announced the Barracuda ES, a 3.5-inch form factor disc drive using perpendicular
recording technology, to address the emerging market in enterprise storage of the use of business critical storage systems for capacity-intensive
enterprise applications that require space optimization, maximized performance and availability.
Desktop Storage
U Series X and Barracuda ATA/SATA Family. The U Series X and Barracuda ATA/SATA families of 3.5-inch disc drives are used in
desktop applications, workstations and low-end applications and ship in capacities
8