Seagate EE25.2 Maxx Computers (78K, PDF) - Page 2

Maxx Computers Keeping Tough Laptops Going With Seagate® EE25 Series™ Drives "We hung up an EE25 Series drive by a string, marked it with an 'X' and trained a laser on it, and then had a pitching machine hit it with a fastball going 70 mph. We picked the EE25 Series drive off the floor, put it in a computer, and the drive worked perfectly" Bill McIlvain, VP, sales and marketing Maxx Computers, LLC To Learn More: Seagate® EE25 Series™ Drives For more information on utilizing EE25 Series drives, visit www.seagate.com. The company's three-year unconditional warranty is another benefit of Van Hooser's 30 years of R&D work with NASA, where he found out through trial and error what works and what doesn't. Neither top secret nor proprietary, such knowledge is shared by NASA with the private sector, and Maxx Computers takes full advantage of it to select only the best available technology. In that light, its selection of the Seagate EE25 Series disk drive is particularly noteworthy. Storage Without Compromise When it came time to select the best ruggedized hard disk drives for its computers, Maxx Computers was not willing to accept compromise. Bill McIlvain, VP of sales and marketing, says with a chuckle, "One of our competitors takes a standard drive and encases it in a gel pack to reduce shock. What's going to happen to that gel in the middle of August in a car that's not airconditioned? It's going to boil, and that can burst the gel pack. "But most of the time you'll just end up with drive failures because of heat. You can't dissipate it." After reading about the EE25 Series drive's ability to withstand extreme temperatures, McIlvain requested evaluation drives. Proof in the Pudding (Cookie?) "In September we put a laptop in a police cruiser at 9 a.m.," McIlvain says. "The car was parked outside, unprotected, no shade, in the middle of a hot parking lot here in Georgia. At 5 p.m. we came back out and the laptop was still running. The car's interior temperature got up to 146, 147 degrees, who knows how long it stayed above 140?" Duly impressed, Maxx Computers testers moved on to more unusual trials. "We took one EE25 Series drive and put it into an oven where we were baking some cookies. When people went to get the cookies, they saw a hard drive in there," McIlvain says. "We took the EE25 Series drive out of the oven, and when it was cool enough to touch we put it in a laptop and it spun right up. That was a very dramatic way of proving the drive can take the heat." Maxx Computers devised an equally unconventional test for shock tolerance. "At a baseball trade show we hung up an EE25 Series drive by a string, marked it with an 'X' and trained a laser on it, and then had a pitching machine hit it with a fastball going 70 mph," McIlvain says. "We picked the EE25 Series drive off the floor, put it in a computer, and the drive worked perfectly." Reliability Is Serious Business Such tests show an enviable flair for memorable demonstrations, but the core strength of Maxx Computers is its unrelenting commitment to product quality and reliability; here Maxx Computers is strictly business. As McIlvain puts it, "If we're going to offer a high-end product and warranty it for three years, no questions asked, we need to make sure there isn't anything substandard in it. "For example, we use higher-end heat sinks that utilize the reverse-thermocouple process. They cost a few dollars more, but Intel makes them. NASA told Intel this is what works, and Intel said they'd build it. They don't offer them with their standard CPUs and processors." Tough Enough...and Then Some The sheriffs' departments and city police departments that Maxx Computers deals with typically budget for a three-year life cycle with laptops. Thanks to the extreme ruggedness of Seagate EE25 Series drives (which include a 5-year limited warranty), McIlvain has no worries. "The EE25 is made so much better than standard drives that it will last past the window that our customers normally keep their machines," he says. AMERICAS ASIA / PACIFIC EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA Seagate Technology LLC 920 Disc Drive, Scotts Valley, California 95066, United States, 831-438-6550 Seagate Technology International Ltd. 7000 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5, Singapore 569877, 65-6485-3888 Seagate Technology SAS 130-136, rue de Silly, 92773, Boulogne-Billancourt Cedex, France 33 1-4186 10 00 Copyright © 2008 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in USA. Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. EE25 Series is either a trademark or registered trademark of Seagate Technology LLC or one of its affiliated companies in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. When referring to hard drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes. Your computer's operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions, and thus will not be available for data storage. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications. Publication Number: CS536.1-0803US, March 2008