Areal Technology Inc, San Jose has succeeded in cramming 260Mb into a 2.5 disk drive enclosure with its A260, to take its bow on the public stage at Comdex/Fall in Las Vegas next month (the show is late this year, running from November 16 to 20. The drive has two platters but is just 0.59 thick. The other dimensions are 3.45 deep and the standard 2.75 wide. If lower heights are required, the C-frame can be removed and the controller board and head-disk assembly mounted separately, cutting the height to 0.4. Areal of course specialises in glass platters, whose smooth surfaces enable the drive to operate at very low flying heights and read data stored at high linear densities reliably, the company says. It offers sub-15mS average access time and has a transfer rate of 16M-bits to 30M-bits per second. Data is stored at 80,000 bits per inch using 1453 cylinders and nine recording zones. The drive is equipped with an AT interface. It costs $485 in OEM quantities from first quarter 1993.
