defron@ocf.berkeley.edu (Daniel Efron) (09/28/90)
The 10/90 issue of Byte has an article about megafloppies. I assume the
2.8M floppy described is the version used by NeXT. The technology is also
licensed to Teac, Chinon, Sony and YE Data.
The article says among other things that the OEM price for the drive is
$220 in quantities of $5000. The OEM price for 4M media (2.8M formatted)
is about $4. For the high density operation the disks require barium-
ferrite coatings as opposed to cobalt-modified iron-oxide particles
currently used for 2M media (1.4M formatted).
Is each piece of media really going to cost $4? I know that doesn't
cost that much compared to all of the other expenditures one must make
for the NeXT. However 2M media only costs about $1 for bulk.
Daniel Efron
defron@ocf.berkeley.edu
ucbvax!ocf!defron
P.S.
No mention was made of NeXT using these drives in the article. However there
is a brief uninformative article (other than basic impressions) about Improv.shwake@raysnec.UUCP (Ray Shwake) (09/30/90)
defron@ocf.berkeley.edu (Daniel Efron) writes: >Is each piece of media really going to cost $4? I know that doesn't >cost that much compared to all of the other expenditures one must make >for the NeXT. However 2M media only costs about $1 for bulk. A new form of media is invariably "expensive" until individual manufacturers get experience and economies of scale, and until the number of manufacturers increases to the point where one has a truly "competitive" market. Recall that 2M media cost $4-$6 only two years ago!