Digital Equipment Corp says it is looking to double its booming $500m-a-year OEM drive business in the coming year. The plan is to establish itself as the leading supplier in the high-end niche sectors in which it operates. The company is planning to expand its disk drive manufacturing operations in Colorado Springs, and Kaufbeuren, Germany and will likely be announcing plans for a new Far Eastern facility in the coming year. It also as a raft of new products, and is extending its OEM service programme which provides installation, repair, emergency and dispatch to its customers. According to InfoCorp, DEC now has a 13.3% share of the non-captive 3.5, 1Gb drive market and the company reckons its OEM business has seen a 100% quarterly growth rate since its formation in 1991. Having already doubled and re-doubled its capacity over the past two years, DEC’s Colorado-based 2.5 and 3.5 drive facility is to be expanded to meet a further three-fold increase in demand. 5.25 form factor tape drives, which are projected to double in annual unit volume will also be produced there. Meantime the German plant, which currently produces 5.25 drives and subsystems is also to manufacture 3.5 disks. New offerings expected to help stimulate growth include three new 3.5 magnetic drives, the DSP3133L, DSP3107L and DSP3053L; a new half inch high 3.5 drive, the DSP3210; a new 5.25 DLT2000 tape drive; a high performance deskside RAID storage subsystem, the SHA21-ZZ; and general purpose deskside storage system, the SHC11-ZZ. DEC says its 5.25 solid state storage devices, the ESP510 and ESP530, announced last year, are also out now in evaluation units. The 3.5 DSP drives, for high end personal computers and fanless workstations, come in 8- and 16-bit wide single-ended and differential SCSI-II versions. They feature a 5,400rpm spindle motor, less than 9.5mS average seek time, 512Kb segmented cache buffer and up to 5.5Mbps transfer rates. Volume pricing for the 1.33Gb capacity DSP3133L is $1,300; the 1.07Gb DSP3107L is $1,200, the 535Mb DSP3053L is $1,000; all third quarter. The 2.1Gb DSP3210 half-height drive spins at 5,400 rpm, has less than 10mS average seek time, 5.6mS latency, a segmented 1Mb cache and up to 5.5Mbps transfer rate. Designed for networked file servers, multi-tasking systems, high-end personal computers, workstations and array subsystems it costs $1,900 in volume and will be available in the second quarter. DEC reckons the DLT2000 is the highest capacity, highest performance tape drive on the market offering 20Gb capacity and 2.5Mbps transfer rate. With an optional seven cartridge mini-libarary it provides 140Gb of data in an 8 half-rack form factor. It will be available in March, priced $39,000. The high performance SHA21-ZZ RAID susbsystem supports software-selectable RAID levels 0, 1, 0+, 3 or 5, can be configured with redundant controllers, power supplies and battery back-up. It comes in a base unit two-shelf pedestal configuration with additional shelf expansion capability of up to 35 drives. With DEC’s DSP3160 drive, base unit capacity is 8Gb and 56Gb expanded. It costs $20,500 from April. The SHC11-ZZ for workstations and personal computers accommodates up to three 2.5 devices or two 3.5 with a half-height 5.25 device with power and cooling elements. It will be available in the second quarter with pricing dependant on configuration. The 5.25 solid state storage systems come with 107Mb and 267Mb formatted capacities respectively, 0.25mS access time and 800 request per second input-output speed. They cost from $13,500 and will be available May.
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