Micropolis Corp, Chatsworth, California has become the first to burst through the Gigabyte barrier on a 3.5 Winchester drive: the company says that its new Model 2112 offers a formatted capacity of 1.050Gb, reaching the milestone a remarkably short time since the first 1Gb plus 5.25 drives started to appear. Moreover the drive has a high rated performance with an average seek time below 10mS and includes an onboard intelligent SCSI-2 controller supporting data transfer rates up to 10Mbytes per second, also claimed to be a first for 3.5 disk drives. Other features include multisegment read ahead cacheing and tagged command queuing. It carries a five-year warranty and a – for the very credulous – is claimed to have a mean-time-between-failure rating of 250,000 hours – that’s 28 years six months. Micropolis has achieved the capacity by using a storage density of 98m bits per square inch on eight platters, comparable to its current Model 1548 2.0Gb 5.25 drive, and it uses advanced Multi-Zone Recording technology, recording data on the disk at varying frequencies, resulting in more uniform data density and an approximate 35% increase in disk capacity over single-frequency drives. The packing features are topped off with a spin rate of 4,500 rpm against the usual 3,600 rpm. The average seek time below 10mS is achieved using observer based digital servo technology to provide enhanced positioner control without the inflexibility of traditional embedded servo technology. And Micropolis hasn’t forgotten that the point of making the disk small is to put it into portable equipment – it includes patented power reduction circuitry designed to match the drive’s power requirements to existing drives in the 200Mb to 500Mb capacity range. Micropolis plans to begin sample shipments in the third quarter of 1991 but gave no indication of the pricing.
