Fujitsu Europe Ltd wants to fire up European enthusiasm for erasable optical technology – lukewarm when compared with the US and Japan – with its 1 high 3.5 optical disk drive, the M2511A. The drive, Fujitsu claims, is not only the smallest but fastest on the market at 3,600rpm. Its average seek time of 30mS is equivalent to the fastest floppy drives. The company expects to sell 10,000 units in fiscal 1992 and around 100,000 in fiscal 1993 in a market that Dataquest puts at 500,000 in 1993, nearly 2m by 1996. The new drive, which is intended as a complement to hard disks, is designed for personal computers and workstations, including the Apple Macintosh, which is expected to account for around two thirds of sales. The M2511A supports rewritable, Optical ROM and Partial ROM media. The Optical ROM enables it to be used for applications currently dominated by CD-ROM – where it offers faster data access rates. The Partial ROM provides opportunities for new applications requiring ROM and RAM on the same media, with application software residing alongside rewritable disk space. It is suitable for desktop publishing, prepress, CAD/CAM, graphics, data analysis and processing, for which it provides data retrieval, security, storage and archiving. The company says it sees the drive being used to unload files and applications which can then transferred to other machines. Its 128Mb capacity is comparable with low-end hard disk drives; and its recording density of 400M-bits per square inch is between three to four times that of hard disks. It has 8.3ms latency; a data transfer rate of 1.09Mbytes per second; and average seek time of 30mS. An embedded SCSI-2 controller provides a data rate of up to 4.0 Mbps in synchronous mode. The drive also features a 256Kb data buffer, load time of five seconds, unload of three seconds and a claimed mean time between failures of 30,000 hours. It requires a single 5V power supply. Evaluation shipments are available now. Production volumes will be available through Fujitsu’s worldwide value-added reseller and dealer network in the fourth quarter for around UKP1,000.
