Hewlett-Packard Co is quietly growing into a major player in the OEM disk drive market and yesterday the company launched a new 3.5 line with capacities of 2.1Gb, 1.6Gb and 1.2Gb. To be made in Boise, Idaho, the HP C2490A, C2488A and C2486A series drives are the third generation in the company’s 3.5 product family, and the line now goes from 234Mb to 2.1Gb. The drives spin at 6,400rpm and have 8.9mS average access time and 4.69mS latency; the burst data rate is up to 57Mbps, the synchronous data transfer rate with Hewlett-Packard’s fast and wide SCSI-2 interface is 20M-bytes per second.The controller includes data prefetch function to enhance disk-drive performance; synchronised spindle function for higher performance in disk-array solutions; configurable segmented-buffer and dynamic buffer-management scheme, enabling the host to manage the buffer for maximum throughput; and tagged command queuing with advanced reordering scheme to arrange commands in the queue to provide the quickest disk response to the host. Evaluation units are available now and volume production is expected to begin in the second quarter; an evaluation unit is $1,980. International Data Corp reckons that Hewlett-Packard took a 23% share worldwide of the non-captive 1Gb-and-up 3.5 disk drive market in 1992.
