FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MILPITAS, CA -- February 25, 1999 -- Read-Rite Corporation (NASDAQ: RDRT) has appointed Dr. Dallas W. Meyer vice president of slider fabrication and assembly engineering, reporting to Dr. Mark E. Re, senior vice president of research and development. Re said, "We are pleased Dallas has decided to join the Read-Rite technical team. His extensive manufacturing and engineering management experience, and his expertise in pico slider fabrication and assembly, will help us attain our goal of becoming the technology leader in the magnetic recording head industry."

Immediately prior to joining Read-Rite, Meyer was executive director of development manufacturing operations for Seagate Technology in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At Seagate, Dr. Meyer was responsible for the development and manufacturing of pre-production materials, and maturing production process capability and yields prior to offshore transfer. Prior to 1993, Dr. Meyer was employed by IBM and was responsible designing and using optical and mechanical instrumentation for assessing tribological performance of disk drives.

Meyer holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Wisconsin and an MS in Structural Engineering and a BS in Civil Engineering, both from the University of Nebraska. He was an U.S. Army Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and a Kiewit Graduate Scholar at the University of Nebraska. In the area of magnetic recording, Dr. Meyer has 4 patents issued, 13 pending patent applications and his extensive collections of technical papers have been published in over 10 key industry journals, including IDEMA's Insight magazine and the Journal of Tribology.

Read-Rite Corporation is one of the world's leading independent manufacturers of MR recording heads, head gimbal assemblies (HGAs) and head stack assemblies (HSAs) for disk drives and tape drives. The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California and has operations in Japan, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore. The company's home page on the World Wide Web can be reached at http://www.readrite.com.