IBM Debuts New Generation of Leadership Mobile Disk Drives

SAN JOSE, Calif., October 9, 1995. . . IBM today introduced its family of
2.5-inch Travelstar 2LP disk drives in slim, low-profile packages offering
capacities of 1080, 810 and 540 megabytes.

IBM expects to have the first 12.5 mm 1 GB drive available in volume for
the mobile market, offering manufacturers unprecedented flexibility in
notebook design with its Travelstar LP. The Travelstar's low-profile
capacity leadership is made possible by IBM's achievement of an areal
density of 923 Mbits/sq. in.

Engineered to offer desktop level compatibility in notebook and subnotebook
systems, the Travelstar 2LP drives also feature IBM's recently announced
Adaptive Battery Life Extender technology. This innovation exclusive to
IBM mobile disk drives, reduces a typical drive's power consumption by as
much as 20 percent without compromising system performance. The Travelstar
2LP drives also support the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting
Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostic protocol, now emerging as an industry
standard for warning end users of an impending drive failure.

"Today's mobile computer users expect desktop level equivalency and
performance from their systems," commented Susan Rosenberg, business line
manager at IBM Storage Systems Division in San Jose, California. "New
operating systems such as OS/2 Warp(R) and Windows 95, high-bandwidth
applications such as integrated fax and multimedia presentation programs,
and the explosion of on-line services and Internet use are challenging
manufacturers to bring notebook and subnotebooks to market with higher
capacities, higher performance and greater resilience than ever before.
Travelstar 2LP drives leverage IBM's leadership mobile storage technology
to enable our OEM customers to meet today's challenges."

               PERFORMANCE AND POWER MANAGEMENT

The Travelstar 2LP family of ATA-2 (IDE) drives features an average seek of
13ms and a spin rate of 4000 RPM. The drives attain a high data transfer
rate of 16.6 MB/sec through the use of PIO Mode 4 or DMA Mode-2.
Implementation of IBM's Adaptive Battery Life Extender technology in the
Travelstar 2LP family extends notebook system battery life, without
compromising performance, by "intelligently" managing the drives' power
mode transitions based on individual users' current access patterns,
instead of on pre-set timers.

                       RELIABILITY

Travelstar 2LP drives are among the most rugged disk drives available,
designed to withstand 500 Gs of non-operating shock and 100 Gs of
operating shock. The drives also incorporate IBM-developed
Magneto-Resistive (MR) head and No-ID sector formatting technologies which
enable higher capacities and enhanced performance while reducing the
number of heads, disks and error-prone moving components at each capacity
point. IBM estimates Mean Time Between Failure for the Travelstar 2LP
family at 300,000 power-on hours.(1)

Additional data safeguarding is provided by IBM's implementation of the
industry-standard S.M.A.R.T. protocol. Travelstar 2LP drives monitor
themselves for specified error conditions to help provide users with
advance warning of an impending disk drive failure. The warning in turn
helps provides users with the time necessary for data backup. IBM's
implementation of the S.M.A.R.T. protocol in its Travelstar drives has
been guided by the company's experience in using proven predictive
algorithms to detect impending drive failure, in particular previous
implementation of Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) on its higher-end
Ultrastar series of drives.

IBM has added another level of data security to its Travelstar drives
through the implementation of "password protection" of the drives
themselves. Password protection of the drive itself helps ensure that
sensitive data will remain secure even if the drive is removed from a
portable system.

Evaluation units of IBM's Travelstar 2LP AT-interface disk drives, models
DSOA-20540 (540 MB), DSOA-20810 (810 MB) and DSOA-21080 (1080 MB) are
available now for OEM manufacturers; the drives are planned to be
available in volume in November 1995.

IBM is the world's largest supplier of computer storage products. Its
Storage Systems Division provides a full line of storage solutions for
OEMs, for commercial and industrial distribution and for IBM computing
systems. Its offerings include disk drives; disk arrays and subsystems;
tape drives, subsystems and automated libraries; optical libraries;
storage controllers and related storage management software.

1. Information on IBM's calculation of mean time between failures
   (MTBF) is available upon request.

Editors/Reporters:

IBM news releases are available on the Internet, via the IBM Home Page
http://www.ibm.com. The IBM Fax Information Service allows you to receive
faxed copies of prior IBM product press releases. Dial 1-800-IBM-4FAX and
enter "99" at the voice menu.
 
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