Syed Iftikar’s still privately-held SyQuest Technologies Inc in Fremont, California, ploughing a somewhat lonely furrow these days with its cartridge disk drives – Tandon Corp with its Data Packs is about the only substantial competitor, has come out with an 88Mb half-height drive that takes cartridges storing 88Mb, claimed to be the highest formatted capacities yet offered on a removable magnetic disk. Evaluation units of the SQ5110 will ship next month with volume production planned to start in June. The exchangeable Winchester drive has average seek time of 20mS and uses a 32Kb buffer to achieve transfer rates up to 4M-bytes per second. A dual density version of the 44Mb SQ555, it will read disks from the lower capacity drive, and incorporates an integral SCSI controller. SyQuest Technology says it has shipped over 500,000 drives and over 2m cartridges since its incorp oration in 1982 and claims over 90% of the removable hard-cartridge mar ket. The company claims that its sales last year rose by 60% to $80m.
