Scotts Valley, California-based Seagate Technology Inc is now in production with its AT-interface disk drive, the Decathlon 850. The 850Mb, dual-platter ST5850A drive combines an 11mS average seek time with a 5,400 rpm spindle speed and 16.6Mb per second Fast ATA-2 disk interface. Seagate, working with San Francisco-based graphics design consulting firm Medius IV, built a 66MHz 80486 SX2-based computer with the Decathlon drive, VL-bus-to-fast ATA host adapter, 8Mb RAM, sound board, MPEG-1 decompression board, video board, speakers and VGA monitor. The system, can play back high-quality, full-screen, 30 frame per second video off the disk drive, which can hold the contents of a fully-loaded CD-ROM disk with room to spare, the firm said. The Decath lon 850 drive has an embedded servo, which eliminates interruptions in video data streams that reduce the quality of video playback; 256Kb cache buffer; 3.5Mb to 4.5Mb per second sustained transfer rate, and is compatible with older IDE interfaces.
