In what looks like a clear sign that the company wants to sell the business, Digital Equipment Corp has given its OEM Storage Business a new name: Avastor. It also established an Avastor Customer Resource Center in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts to provide product information, technical data, installation assistance and trouble-shooting for magnetic disk, tape drive and solid state storage customers. The first move by Avastor was to announce a new Capella Series of disk drives for high-end desktop machines. The line includes the first model from DEC to use magneto-resistive heads, and currently comprises three 3.5, 1 high 5,400rpm drives. The Capella 3221 is the 2.2Gb magneto-resistive head drive with a net host user data transfer rate of 7.5M-bytes per second, and seek time of 8mS. The Capella 3110 stores 1.1Gb and the 3055 550Mb, and they use inductive heads; they seek at 8.5mS and have data transfer rates of 5.2M-bytes per second. The big one is out in the fourth quarter at $1,720, the other two in the third at $1,125 and $765.
