Toshiba America Information Systems Inc’s Disk Products Division (TAIS, has introduced the MK-538FB, a new 1.2Gb formatted 3.5 Winchester disk drive and is was designed and is being manufactured in the US, at the company’s San Jose plant. It is available now in production quantities, and the company claims it is one of the first 1.2Gb capacity drives to ship in volume. The MK-538FB is the second in the company’s line of high-capacity 3.5 Winchester drives, following on the 877Mb MK-438FB drive.The highly automated 90,000-square-foot San Jose facility, which began operation in the second quarter of 1991, is headquarters for all Toshiba high-capacity 3.5 hard disk drive design, development and manufacturing. The eight platter MK-538FB combines a 12mS average seek time with 512Kb of on-board cache and has an in-built SCSI-2 controller supporting a 10Mbytes per second data transfer rate. Power consumption is 10W, and the drive is aimed at high-end MS-DOS and Macintosh personal computers and fanless desktop systems, and at workstations, multi-user systems, disk arrays and file servers. The drive is already qualified with all major controllers and is already Novell Inc Net Ware- and Sparc-certified. The MK-538FB with a three-year warranty is priced at $2,400, and Toshiba is pitching for under a dollar per megabyte for large orders once it gets volumes up.
