Toshiba America Information Systems Inc is set to unveil a 1Gb 3.5 Winchester disk drive, the first in a family of 3.5 products. They are to be manufactured in the US, and Computer Systems News says that manufacturing will be done at Toshiba’s new San Jose facility. If Toshiba meets its schedule and ships in the fourth quarter, the drives will be available just as Maxtor Corp, Seagate Technology and Micropolis Corp start shipping their rival offerings. IBM has previewed its 1Gb Winchester but has yet to announce availability. Toshiba’s drive is being targeted at manufacturers of workstations, servers and disk array subsystems. It uses eight disk platters for 1Gb unformatted capacity, and comes with a 10Mbyte-per-second SCSI-2 interface. The data transfer rate is 25Mbps and the drive offers 512Kb of cache memory with a 12.5mS average seek time. Evaluation units cost $2,295, but that should fall to $1,000 over several years. Toshiba is expected to extend the MR-430 family to include higher capacity and performance drives next year, although further details are not forthcoming at present. The San Jose plant will employ 100 initially, but when the plant reaches full production, a whopping 500,000 drives per annum, that will grow to 400.
