The IBM Personal Computer Co, Maxtor Corp, Seagate Technology Corp, SunDisk Corp and Toshiba Corp came together in Santa Clara to announce that PCMCIA mass storage cards developed and supplied by them will be fully compatible with each other and will also comply to the new Personal Computer Memory Card International Association ATA standard. Microsoft Corp also said that Microsoft At Work software for handheld devices will support the standard. SunDisk is already shipping Flash mass storage cards that comply with the PC Card ATA standard. IBM and Toshiba will start shipment of their ATA cards, based on Toshiba’s Nand EEPROM Flash technology later this year, Maxtor is currently shipping its 105Mb 1.8 disk drive conforming to PCMCIA-ATA in a Type III 10.5mm thick card. And Seagate will ship a Type III card with a 1.8 drive meeting the ATA standard later this year. The firms say they agreed to co-operate on storage card features, as well as system BIOS and driver requirements, to ensure inter-operability and easy data exchange across various computing environments, independent of which microprocessor or which operating system is used. Applications and utilities under MS-DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other operating systems will run on the PCMCIA-ATA cards.The ATA mass storage cards all include an IDE Intelligent Drive Electronics controller on the card.
