Half a Megabyte may be enough for home users, but by next year, they’ll need 1Gb, Conner asserts
San Jose, California-based Conner Peripherals Inc has launched a series of disk drives and tape drives aimed at the lower end of the market. The company predicts that by this time next year a 1Gb disk drive for home users will be a commodity product and it is working to drive down prices and produce disks in volumes. The company says the increased disk space required by newer applications increases users’ need for larger capacity disks. Conner claims that a 420Mb disk will be the entry level for the next couple of quarters but even that will prove too small and by the middle of next year the entry level will be at least 500Mb. Conner has launched a number of 3.5 disk drives for personal computers; a 2.5 disk drive for notebooks; a 1Gb disk drive for desktop systems and the like; and 420Mb minicartridge. The 3.5 disk drives are part of the Filepro Series and are called Cabo. They come in capacities of 270Mb, 425Mb, 540Mb, 850Mb and 1.27Gb. By reducing the number of mechanical and electronic components Conner says its has managed to reduce costs and says the disks come in at around 25 cents per Megabyte. Average seek times are around 15mS, rotational speeds up to 3,600 rpm and there is a mean time between failure ratings of 250,000 hours. All the disks support Parallel Input Output Mode 3 of the Enhanced IDE specification and Mode 1 of Direct Memory Access. This translates into data transfer rates of up to 11Mbps and 13.1Mbps. Conner claims the disks are low on power consumption as they switch to sleep mode automatically. The disks have segmented buffering, enabling the drives to anticipate future operations and execute them during the same revolution of the disk; this improves the drive’s ability to transfer large blocks of data at a rate that is associated with higher performance products, says Conner. OEM evaluation unit prices are as follows: CFS 270A, $170; CFS 425A, $200; CFS 540A, $245; CFS 850A, $365; CFS 1275A, $525
Kiwi 2.5 drive in the Filepro series weighs in at 5 oz, comes with 32Kb buffer
Conner’s Filepro series is the Notebook Low Profile 420A, known as the Kiwi, a 420Mb 2.5 half inch high hard disk drive. The company says the drive combines ruggedness with performance and a light weight, about 5 oz, so making it ideal for notebooks. The height means that it can be located under the keyboard. It has a seek time of 12mS and supports PIO Mode 3 as well as Enhanced IDE interface for data transfer rates of up to 11.1Mbps. It has a 32Kb buffer as standard and it can be expanded to 64Kb. As with the 3.5 disks, the Kiwi includes power-saving features. The Kiwi is compatible with the Manufacturers Compatibility Committee’s mechanical standard for half inch high 2.5 drives. OEM evaluation unit pricing for the CFL 420A is $335; the CFL 350A is $300. Evaluation units will be available next month, with volume production scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 1995. The drives will carry a three-year warranty.
Europe delivers best ever quarter for Conner
After a turbulent year in 1993, Conner is returning to profit and says this quarter will be its best ever in Europe. Last year it ended its contract with its European distributor. One of the contributory factors to last year’s losses was Conner being caught unawares by the changing demand in disk drives and it now admits that it had missed some opportunities but says that it is sticking with tape and disk storage and that it has no intention of trying to become a total storage solutions company. Conner says that as a high volume company, traditional storage media and the low end of the market are still its target markets.
Tape*Stor 420 supports QIC-Wide and quarter inch media
The tape cartridge, the 420Mb Conner Tape*Stor 420 is claimed to be the first Quarter Inch Compatible tape cartridge to support both quarter inch media and QIC-Wide media. When used with the new 400-foot 550 Oe (Oersted) QIC-Wide media developed by Sony Recording Media Products Group it
boosts storage capacity to 420Mb. Conner claims that this product will be the entry level product for personal computer users seeking to use tape to back up their work. It comes with Conner Backup Exec software and a QIC-Wide tape from Sony Corp, installation hardware and documentation. It can be expanded for a 5.25 drive. It is compatible with QIC-80 standards and Accu Trak-120 which makes it compatibility with an installed user base of greater than 2m users, says Conner. It is also backward read-compatible with both AccuTrak-120 and QIC-40 tape formats. It can also sense the type of power supply being used which enables it to be used worldwide as it automatically adjusts to power in the range of 90V to 260V AC and 47Hz to 63Hz. Another automatic feature is the FastSense which enables the tape drive to sense the speed of the host system and use the fastest available data transfer rate. The Tape*Stor is available now, price $200 for the internal system and $370 for the external parallel-port model.
3.5 drive has Antigua technology
The other disk drive launched this month is one based on Antigua technology, a 1Gb 3.5 drive aimed at low cost workstations, advanced desktop systems, entry level servers and disk array storage systems. Also part of the Filepro series, this disk drive is the Performance 1080 (CFP 1080) a 1 high drive with 11mS search time. It has three platters and Conner says the higher storage densities have been achieved through the use of an advanced medium, improved channel electronics and new head technology. The Performance 1080 has a five year warranty, support for Fast Small Computer Systems Interface 2 or Fast Wide Small Computer Systems Interface. It has an adaptive, segmented 256Kb buffer, again with the write cacheing and read look ahead facility. OEM evaluation price is $450.
New business unit for OEM accounts
As part of Conner’s strategy to serve multiple market segments, it has formed a new business unit to concentrate on selling the company’s high performance products to new OEM accounts as well as resellers and dealers. The company says its goal is to reach 1,000 value-added resellers and dealers that serve the high end of the market.
