Ten X Technology Inc, a 25-man spin-off from Texas Instruments Inc based in Austin, has developed what is claimed to be the only hardware kits available to integrate optical drives into high end personal computers and workstations running Unix. Ten X Optical Conversion Units, which have now become available in the UK through a distribution deal with Magstore Ltd of Aldershot in Hampshire, obviate the need for additional file management software and specific device drivers, making the optical drive transparent to the host computer. New optical cartridges are formatted using the disk utilities on the host operating system. The Optical Conversion Units support write once, erasable and multi-functional optical drives, work with SCSI bus and QIC-122 compression standards to boost reading and writing speed, and support secure write cache buffering. QIC-122 compression enables up to 4.5Gb to be stored on a 940Mb drive. Compression (1.5Mb per second) and decompression (5Mb per second) is handled by a dedicated NEC V50 processor. Prices in the UK range from UKP810 to UKP1,500. Magstore, which sells the Units as part of a package including the drive, says it has already sold 50 on around 10 hosts, including Sun Microsystems Inc, Data General Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Silicon Graphics Inc Unix boxes.
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