A 5.25 Solid State Disk Memory, part of the company’s DRAMfile range, has been developed and manufactured by Leatherhead, Surrey-based Vermont Research Ltd and is being distributed by Ideal Hardware UK for 80386 and 80486-based XT and AT-bus-based personal computers. With an access time of less than 1mS using this solid state technology, compared with the average access time of mechanical disk drives of between 18mS and 36mS, the thing, Ideal’s managing director James Wickes believes, will give desktops much more steam. The Solid State Disk Memory uses the SCSI interface and has a capacity ranging from 8Mb to 32Mb. It is available in full and half height form factors and can fit into standard personal computer disk drive enclosures. There is facility for both internal and external battery back-up, though this reduces the memory space. Ideal will also package DRAMfile units as external drives for Apple Mac and MS-DOS machines. Solid state secondary memory has been slow to take off due to price but with the DRAM chips having increased capacity from 256K-bits to 1M-bit and an enormous price erosion the technology has become more feasible. Even though the technology is not cheap Vermont believes that the increase in performance justifies the cost. For example, for users of large files for computer-aided design and manufacture, users of networked file servers who can use the solid state memory for key files. Other uses include high speed data acquisition, and also to enhance the performance of XT and AT-bus type computers. There are several models in the range starting at under UKP300 per Megabyte, but marketing director Peter Harris believes that the price will drop to UKP200 over the next year if DRAM pricing follows the same curve as it has done over the past 12 months. NEC and Hitachi also have 5.25 solid state memory devices but have not publically marketed them. US-based Vermont Research Ltd has been a supplier of memory devices for 26 years, initially in electro-mechanical drum and disk memories which it still supports, but three years ago moved into solid state storage devices. In Leatherhead, Surrey, the company has 37 employees who are mainly engineers, 15 people in the US, and three of its five directors are UK-based. Three years ago the company had approximately 200 employees in the US, but found itself in deep water as the US arm of the company had been spending millions of dollars developing a specialised 8 disk drive for which there proved to be very little market once it was finally ready. During this time the UK company had been investing in solid state storage and believes it has asssured its survival.
