Having set the world standard for sub-5.25 floppy disk drives, Sony Corp is defying conventional wisdom that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place by seeking to set the norm for the next size down. It has opted for a 2 platter and has introduced both the PDD100 drive, and the PDM-1 medium, which is derived from the video floppies used in those electronic still cameras that have been on the market in Japan for a couple of years. The one-sided metal disk stores 1Mb at 254 tracks per inch and recording density is 51.2K-bits per inch. The drive rotates at 3,600 revolutions per second, 12 times the rate of existing drives, and transfers data at about 1.8M-bits per second. The drive uses Cyclic Redundancy Checking for error detection and correction, and Sony offers sample drives at $272, and disks at $7.50.
