So many people have peeled off from Storage Technology Corp to start new companys over the years that Longmont, Colorado is a magent for companies with ambitions in the magnetic storage business – and it is from there that Fujitsu Ltd’s Intellistor Inc subsidiary reveals that it is shadowing StorageTek’s disk array development effort with one of its own – and also working on a 2.5 Winchester for lap-top, notebook and pocket computers. The work is being done at Intellistor’s new research and development facility in Longmont, and the company says it is working on 2.5 drives that will store the 100Mb to 300Mb offered by today’s 3.5 drives – and Intellistor is designing the thing to survive being bounced around and left in extreme hot and or cold. It sees the drives being used in things like personal facsimile machines in cars, in high-definition television, and in undreamed of applications as well as computers.On its disk array effort, Intellistor says it is thinking in terms of a matrix of five to 10 drives with striping – writing sequential data in parallel to several disks simultan eously to speed access times. At least one disk will be dedicated to tracking the data so that it can be rec onstructed if another of the disks fails. Intellistor also sees a need for the speed of disk arrays in imaging applications such as X- ray photographs, three-dimensional representations of mechanical parts and theoretical molecule models. It gave no indication of when the things would appear as products.
