San Jose-based Maxtor Corp’s Maxoptix Corp optical drive joint venture has expanded its Tahiti family of erasable optical disks with the 1Gb Maxoptix Tahiti II, claimed to be the highest performance and highest capacity 5.25 erasable optical drive on the market. Tahiti II has a seek time as low as 25mS for the 1Gb platter and 35mS for the 650Mb platter, embedded SCSI II controller and 4Mbytes-per-second synchronous burst transfer rate; it can support sustained transfer rates of more than 1Mbyte-per-second, 50% to 100% faster than competing optical drives. The Tahiti II is also the first optical drive to incorporate the Advanced Micro Devices Inc optical disk controller chip set, and uses a 16MHz microprocessor and 256Kb to double the transfer rate of Tahiti I. Wang Laboratories Inc of Lowell, Massachusetts is the first systems level vendor to begin shipping the new drive to end-user customers. It is also claimed to be the first optical drive to support both single-ended and differential SCSI controller systems in the 5.25 form factor. A differential SCSI controller enables installation of the drive far from the host. Its controller enables the drive to handle up to 23 input-output operations per second, equivalent to a moderate performance Winchester. It comes in two sector sizes – 650Mb and 1Gb capacity 512 byte sector, and 650Mb and 1Gb 1,024 byte sector, making it suitable for MS-DOS, Unix and most other operating environments. It’s out now; no indication of price was given.
