SyQuest Technology Inc has been given the bloodiest of noses by former under-achiever Iomega Corp in its chosen business of removable disk cartridge storage, but the Fremont, California company is confident that its super-high density Rocket, which can store upwards of 4.7Gb, will rocket it back to the top of the removable storage tree. The company expects to incorporate the technology into some of its drives by the end of the year. SyQuest sees such drives finding favor with makers workstations, servers, jukeboxes and audio-video editing products, and reckons it is ideally suited to MMX multimedia systems. The company has had to go outside for some of the key Rocket technology, adopting IBM Corp’s IBM’s Partial Response Maximum Likelihood read channel chip and Headway Technology Inc’s new Dual Stripe Magneto- Resistive recording heads – Headway was formed in Milpitas in 1994 by Hewlett-Packard Co, Komag Inc, Asahi Glass Co Ltd and Asahi Komag Co Ltd to develop advanced recording heads. SyQuest believes that the capability to store an entire movie on one cartridge will enable Rocket to pose a challenge to Digital Video Disk. The company says that, based on early performance data, it expects the first product to sustain a maximum data transfer rate of 10.6M-bytes per second, have an average seek time of 11mS. It also says it is likely to be fitted with a 2Mb intelligent cache. Rocket will be adaptable for different form factors, and SyQuest stresses its advantage over Iomega that its cartridges use rigid platter Winchester technology where Iomega’s Bernouilli technology uses a less durable floppy medium.
