Maxtor Corp, San Jose claims the world’s first 1.8 hard drives to fit 5mm Type II PCMCIA slots. The MobileMax Lite* 85 and MobileMax Lite* 121 Hard Drives come in capacities of 85Mb and 121Mb and are also claimed to be the first drives to run at 3.3V for lower power consumption and a non-operating shock specification of 1,000 Gs. The company says it has managed to do a card drive that fits a 5mm Type II PCMCIA slot by using a signal processor-based electronics architecture reduces the chip count in the drives by 50%, to five chips – the signal processor, read channel chip, buffer RAM and data manager chip, program ROM and servo ASIC. Some of the chips are reduced in height to 1.2mm from 1.6mm via low profile packaging, enabling the circuit board and the disk platter to reside in the same plane. The capacities of Maxtor’s drives are delivered on a single – glass – platter, complying with the Type II form factor. A reduced height in-hub fluid-filled motor is quiet at 24dBA and enables data recording over the entire flyable area of the disk. The drives also use intelligent power management. Spin-up time is under 1.5 seconds from sleep mode to data transmission. Samples, at $450 and $500, next quarter, volume in second quarter.
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