Claiming leadership in the high-capacity miniWinchester market, Siemens Information Systems Memory Products Division in Westlake Village, California has leapfrog-ged the likes of Maxtor Corp with a 777Mb 5.25 disk drive with a fast 16mS average seek time. The MegaFile 5000 Series will be previewed at Comdex Fall next month – but won’t be available until late next year. The company says that the key to developing and producing the drives was the firm’s own thin-film head technology, enabling it to produce longitudinal recording heads with the highest areal density in the industry. The MegaFile 5000 Series will start life with two models: the 5710 has ESDI and the 5720 has SCSI ports. Both have 15MHz data transfer rate, consume less than 30W and are claimed to have 30,000 hour mean time between failures. Evaluation and production quantities are set for the second half of next year, with samples at $3,795.
