A team from Friendship Beyond Borders, an organization that works to build awareness of the achievements of amputees, recently made an attempt to scale the Tibetan peak Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak at 26,900 feet. Seagate donated to the expedition two 40GB 2.5-inch EE25 Series hard drives, a 5GB Pocket Hard Drive and an 8GB CompactFlash Photo Hard Drive.

Although most Seagate hard drives are certified to operate at 10,000 feet, and the EE25 Series even at 14,500 feet, the expedition team brought the Seagate hard drives as high as 18,600 feet, surpassing the 17,500-foot mark achieved last year by a Seagate-supported expedition that tried to scale Mt. Everest.

The team used a notebook which featured an EE25 Series hard drive to check and send e-mail, search the Internet for vital weather forecasts and to update its Web site and expedition blog, so it was very important that the hard drive should not fail. Even tough temperatures fell to as low as minus 20 degrees F (minus 28.8 degrees C) at night they and endured hundreds of miles of jostling on torturous dirt roads, the Seagate hard-drives passed the test of endurance.

Climber George Patterson, a former engineer with Hewlett-Packard, said that “Seagate has the most rugged storage solutions on the market. I read the specs for the drives and was impressed about their reliability, but to see them actually work under some very harsh conditions was a real ‘wow’ factor for me. It shows people at Seagate have thought a lot about reliability and ruggedness, and designed that into their products.”