Seagate Technology Corp this week previews its disk drive blitz planned for Comdex/Fall – the new drives will actually appear first at Systems ’93 in Munich next week – and the portfolio includes a high-speed 4.1Gb 3.5 drive as well as the 9.1Gb 5.25 unit we heralded in CI No 2,264. The ST410800 Elite 9 is a 9.1Gb 5.25 full-height drive spinning at 5,400rpm with average seek time of 11mS and transfer rate of 7M-bytes per second. It comes with SCSI-2 Fast and SCSI-2 Fast/Wide interface options, and the former supports external data rate of up to 10M-bytes per second, the latter up to 20M-bytes per second. Evaluation units cost $3,450 – that’s 38 Cents a Megabyte, and OEM pricing will bring that right down; samples first quarter 1994, volume second. The ST15150 Barracuda 4 is a 4.1Gb 3.5 half-height drive in which the platters spin at a breakneck 7,200rpm. It comes with Fast SCSI-2 or Fast/Wide SCSI-2 interface, and is designed to replace 3Gb to 4Gb 5.25 drives, offering higher performance and half the power drain. Seek time was not given. It costs $2,650 in sample quantities, set for first quarter 1994, with volume in the second quarter. There is a new 1.78Gb variant, the ST12450 Barracuda 2, a half-height 3.5 drive that spins at the same speed, but has a two-head parallel design to give a transfer rate of up to 14.1M-bytes per second. It comes with Fast/Wide SCSI-2 interface and samples, again first quarter, are $1,800, volume second. The ST5660 is a 545Mb 3.5 drive in a new form factor – it is 5 long and 0.75 high and up to six can fit a standard 5.25 bay. It comes with either AT or Fast SCSI-2 interfaces and has 12mS seek time, 256Kb multi-segmented adaptive cache, and spins at 4,500rpm. It dissipates less than 2.5W when idle. It offers data transfer rates of up to 11.1M-bytes per second, direct memory access transfer rates up to 13.3M-bytes per second. Samples – at $495 for AT, $545 for Fast SCSI-2 – and volume are set for first quarter 1994. The company also added 2.14Gb, 1.7Gb and 1.05Gb models in the ST32430 Hawk Family of 3.5 low profile drives, 428Mb, 273Mb and 214Mb models in the low-profile ST3491 family, and 455Mb and 341Mb models in the ST9550 ruggedised 2.5 family.
