Hewlett-Packard Co has entered the market for erasable optical disk drives with a library and a stand-alone subsystem, both based on Sony Corp’s 5.25 drive, and aimed at the OEM market, and will show them at Comdex/Spring in Chicago next week. The C1710A optical disk library system holds 32 platters, each with 650Mb capacity for a library capacity of 20.8Gb, and Hewlett says it has designed a simplified autochanger mechanism without motors, sensors or cables, and used integrated drives designed for heavy use with the autochanger. It includes two of the Sony drives specifically developed for Hewlett’s autochanger. The drives use the magneto-optical record-erase system, and conform to the ISO and ANSI definitions for continuous-composite format. The C1711A is a stand-alone optical disk subsystem with 95mS average seek time, 680Kbytes-per-second read-transfer rate and an SCSI interface. The library with two drives is $29,900, evaluation units are out now and full production is set for late this year. The stand-alone system will be available in June both OEM and at an end-user price of $6,190 plus $250 per disk, at which it will be offered as the Series 6300 Model 650/A to users of Hewlett-Packard’s HP9000 Series 300 running its HP-UX Unix.
