MiniScribe Corp, Longmont, Colorado and Priam Corp, San Jose, yesterday each announced 5.25 disk drives storing 700Mb up. The MiniScribe 9780 stores 780Mb, which formats down to 676Mb, on eight sputtered platters. It has average access time of 17ms and data transfer rates of 15Mbits-per-second with an ESDI interface and 4Mbytes-per-second with SCSI. It features a new Metal-in the-gap ferrite head technology claimed to have the advantages of thin film at lower cost. The 9780 is available in volume now at $3 per megabyte – sounds like $2,350 – in OEM quantities. Priam Corp’s offerings are the 676 and 776 765Mb models, the former using ESDI, the latter SCSI; transfer rates are as for Miniscribe’s drive but access times, at 14mS are faster, although MiniScribe claims 50,000 hours mean-time-between failures against 40,000 hours for the two Priam drives – but Priam will not be shipping in volume until the spring. Single quantity prices are $3,675 for the 676, and $4,550 for the 776.
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