Greatly increasing its chances of success over non-media compatible super-high capacity floppy disk drives, the Citizen America Inc arm of Citizen Watch Co announced at the Comdex show it Atlanta that its parent had developed a 20Mb floppy drive that uses conventional 3.5 disk media. Crucially, the company says that it is also downwardly read- and write-compatible with 720Kb and 1.44Mb drives. The average access time is a very competitive 50mS and uses an SCSI interface with 3.5Mbytes-per-second transfer rate and the thing records 542 tracks per inch rotating at 600rpm. The drive is to be available in volume in the US this summer and will be $200 in OEM quantities.
