IBM seems to be so lacking in confidence these days that it passed up the opportunity of upstaging Amdahl Corp with announcements of its own yesterday, but in the meantime, the company, for long a bit of a joke in the OEM small disk drive business, is going to have to be taken seriously. Eagle-eyed staffers at Computer Systems News spotted the 320Mb 3.5 Winchester stuck away in a PS/2 at Comdex last week, and IBM admitted that samples had gone out to potential OEM customers with the drive from its Rochester, Minnesota unit. It has an 8 bit SCSI interface, average seek time of 12.5mS and data transfer rate of 2Mbytes per second from the disk, 4Mbytes per second at the interface. The company did not say when the drive would be available in production quantities or when it will show up in future PS/2s and RTs. Pricing will not be announced until the unit is formally launched, IBM added.
