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
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