FORMATION, INC. DELIVERS TOUGHDISK rUGGED dISKPACK
tO KONGSBERG DEFENSE & AEROSPACE AS

Ruggedized Packaging, Storage Capacity and Speed of Data Transfer Among
Selection Criterion for Royal Norwegian Navy Weapons System Application

MOORESTOWN, NEW JERSEY, USA, (November 8, 2004)…Formation, Inc. has delivered the first of its ToughDisk® line of rugged hard disks to Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace AS in Kongsberg, Norway. Kongsberg selected Formation’s TD7200 to provide rugged data storage for a ship based weapons system currently in development for the Royal Norwegian Navy.

“We needed a data storage solution that could tolerate the nature of our application,” said Helge Bøe, Purchasing Coordinator, Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace AS. “The diskpack will be integrated into a VME rack that will be mounted into a rugged cabinet within the ship’s weapon system. ToughDisk’s storage capacity, speed of data transfer and its ability to tolerate harsh conditions are all necessities for our application.”
 

ToughDisk rugged hard disks are high-performance, removable data storage units built specifically to withstand extreme temperature, shock, vibration, humidity and dust conditions. The TD7200 is a 160 GByte, hot-swappable, self-contained mass memory unit with dual Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces that provides data transfer rates of up to 68 MB/s.
 

"The need for information and the amount of data storage required for military applications is growing exponentially. Using hard disks in place of solid state data storage is attractive because of the significant cost and capacity advantages,” said R. Nim Evatt, Formation CEO and President. “Solid state storage is at least ten times more expensive than hard disk storage, but a standard disk drive placed in an extreme environment will fail. We’ve built ToughDisk for conditions typical of naval vessels, manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft, ground vehicles and outdoor computer installations.”
 

In addition to the TD7200, Formation also offers the TD3500, a rugged drop-in replacement for standard 3.5” low profile disk drives with 73 or 80 Gbyte capacity and ATA, SCSI or Fiber Channel interfaces.
 

Formation has delivered over 1200 rugged disk systems, 11,000 high performance RAID systems, and 1200 avionics-class servers for mission-critical applications including streaming multimedia (e.g., reconnaissance data), aircraft health information and sensitive financial data. ToughDisk combines Formation’s latest patent-pending developments with over a decade of leading-edge disk application innovation.