By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM wants to get a piece of the action in the desktop backup market that is more or less controlled by Iomega with its Zip family of fat diskettes and yesterday announced a new 200Mb floppy diskette drive for its PCs that, like the original 3.5- inch floppy disk drives that first shipped in 1987 with its PS/2 line of computers, is actually built by Sony. The new HiFD diskette differs from the Iomega 100Mb and 250Mb Zip drives in that it can read data from vintage 720Mb and standard 1.44Mb hard shell floppy diskettes.
The HiFD also differs from IBM’s 2.88Mb floppy diskette drive, which shipped in the waning years of the PS/2 generation and which never caught on because neither its drives nor its media were high volume products and were therefore was expensive. The 2.88Mb drives were not a high volume product mainly because PC users in the early 1990s didn’t have the gargantuan files that are commonplace today. Hence, it never took off. This will probably not be the case with the HiFD.
With 200Mb of storage, each HiFD diskette can store 140 times more data than the standard 1.44Mb floppy diskette, which means it can hold about 15 minutes of MPEG video or 45 minutes of stereo audio data. The device has a data transfer rate of 3.6Mbps, which is 60 times faster than a floppy disk and which means it can actually support full motion video. The HiFD diskette fits in the same size PC bay as a regular 1.44Mb floppy diskette. It has been tested and warrantied for IBM’s IntelliStation workstations and PC 300 commercial desktop PCs.
IBM is not requiring that its customers take the HiFD as a replacement for either their 1.44Mb floppies, but is instead giving customers the option of choosing it if they want to pay the extra money for it. The drive will be particularly attractive to customers who would ordinarily buy a Zip 100 drive, although IBM says that it is not delivering the HiFD diskette as a replacement product to compete against Iomega’s Zips. IBM says that it eventually expects the ship rate on the HiFD drive to resemble that of the Zip installed base, which now numbers some 30 million units and which is dominated by the Zip 100 drive. However, IBM expects that the HiFD base might grow a little slower than the Zip 100 base given that at $149, it is a bit more expensive than the low-end Zip unit. The HiFD will be available for IBM PCs starting December 17 for $149. IBM is not specifically offering it on its server platforms, but customers wanting to install one on their servers will be able to do so.
