Cypress, California-based Mass Optical Storage Technologies Inc has unveiled a new dual-capacity erasable optical disk drive, the RMD-5200-S. The product offers 128Mb ANSI/ISO compatibility, as well as 256Mb capacity in free-format mode. The dual capacity modes are media dependent, which automatically provides complete control and security through the ISO interchange standards, without operator intervention. Automatic Media Sensing is implemented for media identification, enabling the drive to shift to the different capacity modes. The company’s 1.6 micron track pitch Free Format medium enables the drive to achieve the 256Mb capacity. Control track information triggers the high capacity mode and enables Group Code encoding and Zone formatting. According to Mass Optical, the RMD-5200-S brings the storage, security and handling advantages of removable 3.5 optical media into applications requiring high storage capacities. Average seek time is 35mS, while the short scan-seek function enables data access within a 128 track-band in 12mS. Data transfer rate performance, in high-capacity mode, says the company, far exceed the normal operating speeds of between 820Kbps and 1.2Mbps. The drive also provides for SCSI burst rates of 3Mbps in asynchronous mode and up to 5Mbps in synchronous mode. It incorporates an embedded SCSI controller and a 64Kb Read Ahead Cache. Additional features include extensive internal diagnostics, customer-programmable EEPROM and an advanced Reed Solomon error correction scheme. All Mass Optical drives are claimed to have a 30,000 hour mean time between failures and are warranted for one year. OEM evaluation units will ship later this month, with production in the first quarter. Pricing is based on annual quantities..pl 63
