dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (02/16/90)
I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon wandering around the Systems/USA trade show in San Jose... it's a show oriented towards OEM system manufacturers. A number of the major players in small-system hard disks were present, showing off their current and upcoming products. I imagine that we'll see a number of these drives available in the Mac end-user market within a few months, or by the end of the year. Most vendors seem to be focusing on 3.5" Winchester drives... there were lots of half-height drives of this form-factor, ranging from 20 megabytes up to 200 megs or more. Several vendors were showing low-profile 3.5" drives... 1" high, or even less. There were even a couple of _very_ thin 2.5" drives being shown... 3/4" high or even less! A few items of particular note: - Quantum was showing three product lines: the ProDrive 40S/80S/105S half-height 3.5" drives (very popular in the Mac market these days... 19 ms average seek), the ProDrive LPS 52S/105S (1" low profile, 17 ms seek), and the ProDrive 120S/170S/210S (half height, high performance SCSI-1/SCSI-2, <15 ms average seek). All of these drives have 64k-byte controller caches, which can cut the effective seek time during typical use. When I asked about the sticky-drive problem, I was assured that they're using a new grease which doesn't gum up. - Conner was showing some really tiny drives intended for installation in laptops, briefcase PCs, and the like. - Seagate was showing drives in their product line... both the "traditional" Seagate drives, and the drives in the Imprimis Wren and Swift families (they seem to be merging the product naming to comply with the Seagate nomenclature... although the drives were also labelled "Wren 4", etc.). I finally found out what a "Wren Runner" drive really is. The 300-meg Wren Runner is essentially a 600-meg Wren which is restricted to using only the outer half of the platter... the heads have only half as far to move, on average, as on a stock 300-meg Wren 4, and thus can access the data faster. The 300-meg Wren Runner is priced as a premium 300-meg disk, rather than as a 600-meg... even though it's physically almost identical to the 600-meg Wren. A new "Wren Runner-2" will be coming out shortly... it will be a 600-meg drive, using the outer half of an 1.1-gigabyte Wren mechanism. There's a new line of Seagate half-height 3.5" drives under development. They may be marketed as part of the Swift line, or under a new label (or perhaps only by model number). They're being developed by many of the same people responsible for the Wren drives, and will offer capabilities starting at roughly 200 megabytes. These'll be drives to watch for! - SyQuest was showing three different mechanisms... and there's a fourth in the wings. They had their venerable SQ555 on display. This is the well-known 44-meg (formatted) 5.25" Winchester cartridge drive. The current version has a 20-msec "average" seek time (their glossy actually _defines_ what they mean by "average": 1/3 stroke seek) and an MTBF of 30,000 hours. OEM quantity-purchase price for this drive (mechanism plus cartridge) is approximately $300. They're working on a 100-meg-or-so version of this drive. It will use the same cartridges, recorded at a higher density. It will be able to read the 44-meg format... and their goal is to enable it to write the 44-meg format as well... full backwards compatibility with the SQ555. This'll be a neat trick if they can do it! They were also showing the SQ355... it's a 42-meg (formatted), 19- millisecond cartridge mechanism in a low-profile (1" high) 3.5" form-factor. The cartridge is about the size of three Mac floppies stacked together; the drive looks as if it could fit into a portable or laptop PC's floppy slot without difficulty. Yet another new offering is the SQ5200 - a 175-meg (!) cartridge drive in a low-profile 5.25" form factor. The cartridge is a two- platter, four-head sealed Winchester mechanism... unlike the SQ555 and SQ355, which have an open cartridge. The SQ5200 drive itself looks much simpler than the SQ555, as it doesn't include the heads or arms... these are sealed in the cartridge. I imagine that the SQ5200 will be less prone to problems with dust, etc. than the SQ555... SyQuest is quoting a 60,000-hour MTBF for this drive. SyQuest apparently hopes to offer this drive at about twice the price of the SQ555 (OEM price of about $600 for a mechanism and one cartridge). -- Dave Platt VOICE: (415) 493-8805 UUCP: ...!{ames,apple,uunet}!coherent!dplatt DOMAIN: dplatt@coherent.com INTERNET: coherent!dplatt@ames.arpa, ...@uunet.uu.net USNAIL: Coherent Thought Inc. 3350 West Bayshore #205 Palo Alto CA 94303