Fujitsu Ltd has introduced what it claims is the broadest hard drive line in the history of the company including its first based on magneto-resistive recording heads, and claims that this, coupled with other new technologies, will eventually enable ot to do drives with 20 times today’s capacities. Like IBM Corp – see alongside – the company is offering two alternatives at each capacity – one for those needing high performance, the other the lowest cost per Megabyte. Fujitsu’s new magneto-resistive drives store nearly 300M-bits per square inch, and will exceed 1G-bits per square inch in the near future. The company also uses what it calls Partial Response Maximum Likelihood read channel technology to enhance the ability of a magneto-resistive drive to read data recorded at higher densities. It takes multiple samples of each recorded data bit or pulse ensuring maximum likelihood of read-recovery, and enables more data to be recorded on each track; it reads at nearly 9M-bytes per second; the drives also feature a new eight-in-nine recording code which it says results in increased signal strength, over 25% higher than prior one-in seven codes, when recording at high bit densities. The Allegro-1 line of 3.5 full height drives comes in models with 3.1Gb, 2Gb and 1.05Gb with average seek times down to 9.0mS. They ship first quarter next year. The Allegro-1SL is a slimline 1Gb drive with seek time down to 10mS. The Hornet-5 family is a series of 2.5 drives using the new technologies, which offers capacities of 530Mb to 260Mb. They come in IDE-Enhanced and SCSI-FAST versions providing burst data transfer rates of 8M-bytes to 10M-bytes per second. The Allegro 1s cost $1,700 in volume, the 1SL is $895, Hornet-5s are $550 for the big one down to $325 for the baby, early 1994.
