There is a completely unmet demand for a cheap’n’cheerful notebook computer – with keyboard big enough for word processing – at no more than $500, but such a thing will be easier to put together once the LS-120 120Mb floppy drives become established. The fact that they are a lot slower than a hard disk is less of an issue for notebook users doing things like word processing, because they are used to having to wake the disk up every time they want to make an access. OR Technology Inc and plattermaker Imation Inc have both given the new drive system a push, OR with a new ultra-slim drive, Imation with accelerator software. Campbell, California-based OR calls its new device the a:drive, and, as with all LS-120 drives, it reads and writes 1.44Mb and 720Mb floppies too, while offering 80 times the capacity and five times the performance of conventional floppy drives. The drive measures 3.8 by 4.9 by 0.5 thick, and is claimed to be only high capacity alternative to the floppy disk drive that can be installed in standard drive bays. It has an ATAPI/IDE interface, ships in the third quarter and costs $150 at retail. The floppy disks cost $20 each. As well as the disks – also made by Hitachi Maxell Ltd – Imation’s contribution is the LS-120 Performance Accelerator, software that invokes data cacheing and buffering to improve performance to levels similar to that of hard disk drives in most operations under Windows95. The Oakdale, Minnesota firm expects to ship its LS-120 Performance Accelerator in April; no price was given.
