Xyratex Ltd, the company formed by the management buyout of the IBM UK Ltd Havant, Hampshire manufacturing plant (CI No 2,566) has been detailing some of its products. It has already won deals with Nomai SA to make its cartridge drives and with Sunnyvale, California-based JTS Corp to build JTS’s unique, but still unannounced 3 exchangeable cartridge disk drives, which are expected to have capacities somewhere in the 200Mb to 1Gb range (CI No 2,568). Now it is producing a selection of hard disk and optical disk drives for the OEM market, based on IBM technology. It is shipping a range of removable 2.5 hard disk drives with capacities of up to 10Mb. The drives are packaged either as a single one in a casing or as five in a stack that can sit on a user’s desk. There are also three optical disk drive products: the Xyratex MOlite, Xyratex 3000 and Xyratex 5000. The MOlite is based on IBM’s 230Mb drive mechanism and is a ‘small, neat’ portable drive that has been distinguished from its IBM parent by its hardware packaging. Xyratex says considerable attention has been paid to the design of the box, given that the biggest market for optical disk drives is in design and publishing houses. It weighs 1 lb 14 oz and comes bundled with software that Xyratex says makes attachment to Macintoshes and iAPX-86 personal computers via SCSI, straightforward. The Xyratex 3000 and 5000 are also based on the same mechanism. The 3000 is a 3.5 optical disk drive with a 230Mb capacity, the 5000 a 5.25 optical d isk drive with up to 1.3Gb. Both come with software that enables them to work with a variety of Unix systems. The 5000 works with RS/6000, Silicon Graphics Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc versions of Unix. The 3000 works with all these systems as well as with Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Unix and it also works on Macintoshes and iAPX-86-based personal computers. Xyratex, whose official name is Havant International Ltd, has three divisions, storage, testers and flexible circuits.
