March 14, 2008 - Employees at Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) have been enjoying some hands-on experience of how Seagate hard disc drives are aiding the gaming industry revolution.

The Dragonslayers – the official Gaming Society of Queen's University Belfast and organisers of Ireland’s largest gaming event, Q-Con IV – were invited to set up an interactive gaming exhibition at Seagate so employees could experience exhilarating game play with the world’s most popular gaming consoles and Seagate hard disc drives.

Explaining why the event had been organised, John Spangler, vice president and managing director at Seagate’s Springtown facility, said, “Locally, employees only get to see part of the picture in the day to day process of manufacturing the recording head component for our hard drives. We wanted to highlight the relevance of what employees are doing by showing them how the finished product is used within consumer electronics products. These gaming sessions allowed us to demonstrate to employees the importance of a high performance hard drive in providing the best possible gaming experience.”

As part of the exhibition, a number of PCs were transformed into ultimate gaming rigs, with each being equipped with two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives. This drive delivers powerful PC gaming performance, allowing gamers to deploy multiple drives in a mirroring mode for extreme gaming experience. With up to 1TB of capacity, Seagate Barracuda hard drives offer enough storage for more than 150 quality games and the Seagate fluid-dynamic bearing motors offer whisper-quiet operation so all you hear are the thrills of the game itself.

“Today’s gaming consoles are fueled by Seagate hard drives, which provide the power to enrich the gaming experience by unleashing new features that increase gaming realism, excitement and customisation,” says Ben Harrison, honorary president of the Dragonslayers, explaining why Seagate is his hard drive brand of choice.

As hoped, it was not just the experienced gamers with consoles at home who availed themselves of the opportunity. Enticed by the chance to win highly coveted Seagate branded products to take home, a number of gaming beginners exploited the chance to gain a better understanding of the benefits of Seagate’s products to the gaming industry, and why Seagate is often the hard drive of choice for gaming software developers and animators.

Eight of these Barracuda drives will now be used by the Dragonslayers at their Q-Con XV event in June. Some will be prizes, but four will be used for the crucial job of running the event's gaming servers and web servers. Two will be used in mirroring mode to ensure the website stays up at all times and two will be used in the game server to avoid the massive bottleneck of loading all the data off one disc.