WESTERN DIGITAL TAKES LEADERSHIP ROLE WITH FAST20 SCSI I/O TECHNOLOGIES

Company offers first complete range of Fast20 I/O products, from disk
controllers to PCI-Fast20 Host Bus Adapters

IRVINE, CA -- Aug. 14, 1995 -- Paving the way to faster, cutting-edge
input/output (I/O) solutions, Western Digital Corp. (NYSE:WDC) today
announced that it has begun sampling a full range of Fast20 SCSI I/O
solutions including SCSI disk controllers, PCI-Fast20 bus controllers and
PCI-Fast20 Host Bus Adapters. This product offering constitutes the
broadest Fast20 lineup in the industry, making Western Digital the
"one-stop shop" for all Fast20 I/O requirements.

"Our early leadership in Fast20 technologies allows us to partner with
high-end drive and systems manufacturers to help shape and define I/O
performance for future generations of products," said Dan Brown, vice
president for Western Digital's I/O Products Unit. "Western Digital's
expertise extends beyond one end of the solution. With expertise ranging
from Fast20 drive controllers to host bus adapters, we offer the highest
level of expertise to our customers for their design efforts."

Fast20 SCSI doubles the transfer rates of today's current SCSI solutions up
to 40MB/sec. to meet the most demanding requirements for enterprise-wide
computing. Western Digital's Fast20 solutions give customers the
performance advantage of the Fast20 transfer rate, while being completely
backward compatible with older SCSI technologies, preserving their
investment in existing SCSI peripherals.

Integrated SCSI Disk Controllers

Western Digital's integrated SCSI disk controller, the WD61C96H is sampling
now to high-end drive manufacturers and will boost the performance of
Fast20 drives expected to hit the market in Q1 calendar 1996. The WD61C96H
cranks up the performance level for Fast20 controllers by delivering
sustained bandwidth for consistent 16-bit SCSI transfers at 40MB/sec.
transfer rates, while supporting disk data rates up to 17.5MB/sec.

Western Digital's highly integrated Fast20 disk controller has
state-of-the-art features that allow drive manufacturers to tune the chip
for optimum performance and usability. Features include a programmable
disk and SCSI writable control storage and SCSI slew rate control, LRC or
CRC parity and a 144-bit reed-solomon ECC for maximum data integrity. The
WD61C96H supports up to 4Mword (8MB) EDO DRAM or standard DRAM allowing
disk drive manufacturers to select the most cost-effective performance
solution for their requirements.

Production units of the WD61C96H will be available in Q4 calendar 1995.

Fast20 SCSI Bus Controllers and Adapters

Western Digital's Fast20 product offering supports the PCI bus with Fast20
bus controllers and host bus adapters. The controller family, the
WD34C296A, WD34C197A and WD34C193A, provides single-chip Fast20 solutions
for motherboards or add-in cards. Designed for processing intensive,
multi-threaded applications, the controllers raise SCSI I/O performance
for clustered computing environments.

The controllers are the core of Western Digital's Fast20 Host Bus Adapters,
the WD7296F, WD7197F and WD7193F. The adapters support hot-plug operation,
enabling devices to be added or removed from the bus without interfering
with on-going transactions. The PCI-Fast20 controllers and host bus
adapters give users performance advantages through:

* A Writable Control Store, which implements SCSI command protocol in
hardware to minimize SCSI overhead for maximum 40MB/sec. throughput and
the highest degree of flexibility

* 288-byte total FIFO depth (32 for SCSI bus, 256 for PCI bus), which
allows bursts up to 256 bytes

* 8KB command queue, which allows multiple command processing without
burdening the PCI bus

* 64-bit addressing support for PCI bus dual-address cycle protocol

The entire family of Fast20 SCSI controllers and adapters is fully backward
compatible with all existing SCSI technologies and peripherals. The
products are sampling now and will be in production in Q1 calendar 1996.

Corporate Background

Headquartered in Irvine, California, Western Digital Corporation is a
recognized leader in the design and manufacture of hard disk drives,
integrated circuits and graphics controller board-level products. The
company markets these products to leading systems manufacturers and
selected resellers under the Western Digital, Caviar, Paradise and
RocketCHIP brand names. Western Digital is the first U.S.-headquartered,
multinational company to have been awarded company-wide ISO 9001
registration, linking all WD organizations with a consistent global
standard for quality processes. The company was founded in 1970 and has
long been noted for its storage and graphics controller expertise and
end-market systems-level design knowledge.

The company can be found on-line with a World Wide Web home page at
http://www.wdc.com or on America Online by using the key words Western
Digital or WDC.
 
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