Hitachi Ltd is claiming world leadership in disk drive capacity with its new H6587 range of 35Gb drives (CI No 1,480), topping the 30Gb units from Fujitsu Ltd and 34.2Gb drives from NEC Corp – and will get the new drives to market first, shipping the things in September against year-end for Fujitsu, 1991 for NEC; Hitachi says that its new head-disk assembly improves storage capacity by 2.3 times, and it offers 93Gb per string; it claims a seek time of 12nS with average rotational delay of 7.1mS; data transfer rate of 4.2Mbytes per second; an Architecture-Level Cache which provides a separate cache for each disk volume; and Extended Cross-Call feature which provides four paths per disk volume to avoid path contention; the company also enhanced the H-6581-C3 Cache Disk Controller with extended high-speed write support, and an idle dump function, and a 9Mbyte-per-second data streaming rate; the company also announced new tape drives for use with its own and IBM mainframes, the H6486-1 and H6482-1, with monthly rentals of from $4,500 and $7,660.
