Quantum Corp has announced the Empire II and Atlas II 3.5 drive families, products resulting from the merger of technologies acquired when the company bought Digital Equipment Corp’s storage division last year (CI No 2,461). Quantum is claiming the Empire II series is the first drive to combine Partial Response Maximum Likelihood read channel with magnetoresistive heads technology, which Quantum gained from DEC’s interest in Rocky Mountain Magnetics Inc. The Atlas II drives also have magnetoresistive heads, and Ultra SCSI and Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop interfaces, capable of data transfer rates of up to 200M-bits per second. The Empire II drives are aimed at the mid-range market such as high-end personal computers, desktop workstations, personal computers servers and low-end disk arrays. The Partial Response Maximum Likelihood read channel technology used in the Empire is the company’s third generation, and draws less power and has a lower cost structure than Quantum’s previous two-chip im plementations, with data rates of 90M-bits per second. The Quantum Atlas II is aimed at the high-end market where the company sees better margins – the reason that it was keen to buy DEC’s disk drive manufacturing business. Atlas II will be aimed at applications such as video and database superservers, high-end Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks subsystems, technical workstations and other multi-user systems. Quantum is claiming that the Atlas drive offers the lowest seek times in the industry, less than 7.9mS, and one of the fastest read channels operating at 110Mbps. By executing a number of functions in hardware rather than firmware, Quantum’s ASABET chip set, again from DEC, limits the overhead and improves overall performance. Quantum says improved reliability of the drives results from advanced ASIC integration and a design that requires 50% fewer heads and disks than drives with the same capacities introduced a year ago. Evaluation units of the Empire II and Atlas II drives will be ready next quarter, with volume in the fourth. Single unit OEM prices for the Atlas II arebe 9.1Gb, $3,000; 4.3Gb, $1,800; and 2.1Gb, $1,200. Prices for the Empire II drives will be 9.1Gb, $2,500; 4.3Gb, $1,500; and 2.1Gb, $1,000. The Quantum Empire II and Quantum Atlas II families will ship with 8-bit and 16-bit Ultra SCSI and the 80-pin single connector attachment. The Quantum Atlas II drives have wide differential Ultra SCSI. The Empire drive with new FC-AL interface for the Quantum Atlas II will ship in the first quarter of 1996.
