Scotts Valley, California-based Seagate Technology Inc joined the disk drive fiesta with new drives in all major form factors – 1.8, 2.5, 3.5 and 5.25. The ST7050P is a 42Mb 1.8 unit claimed to be the highest capacity drive to support the PCMCIA Type III memory card interface for removable peripherals. It is 0.41 high and draws 1.3W in read-write, 500mW in idle and 130W in standby modes. ST9295AG/N, ST9100AG and ST9235AG/N are 2.5 AT drives with the company’s new SafeRite shock sensing technology. The 260Mb ST9295 is claimed to be the highest capacity 2.5 drive yet and offers AT or SCSI interface. The 209Mb ST9235N is an SCSI version of the ST9235AG. The ST9100AG is an 85Mb drive with average seek time of 16mS, AT interface and 88-bit on-the-fly error correction code. The ST3550A/N and ST3385A are 1 high 3.5 drives storing 450Mb and 340Mb respectively. They have 256Kb segmented cache for 12mS average seek time and transfer rates of up to 10M-bytes per second. They dissipate 3W in idle and 5.4W in read-write mode. The ST3385 has AT, the ST3550 either AT or Fast SCSI-2 interface. The ST3610N/ND is a 535Mb 3.5 drive with 5,400 rpm spindle rotation speed, average latency of 5.56mS, average seek time of 10.5mS, track-to-track seeks of 1.5mS. The 1.05Gb 3.5 ST31200N spins at 6,300 rpm in a 1 form factor and comes standard with 256Kb multi-segmented adaptive cache with optional 1,024Kb cache, average seek time of 9mS for read operations, track-to-track seek of 1.5mS, in single-ended or differential input-output versions. The ST12400N/ND and ST11700N/ND are new 1.4Gb and 2.1Gb versions in the ST11200 3.5 line with Fast SCSI-2 or Fast and Wide SCSI-2. The Barracuda Family drives are 3.5 spinning at 7,200 rpm, with average seek time of 8mS, track-to-track seeks of 0.6mS and average latency of 4.17mS. The ST12550 and ST12551 versions store 2.1Gb with Fast SCSI-2 or Fast and Wide SCSI-2. There are also 1.4Gb versions. The ST43402ND Super Elite is a 5.25 drive storing 3Gb; it has 2Mb cache, dual ports and Fast and Wide SCSI-2 interface. Price and availability will be given at Comdex/Fall. The patented SafeRite system is designed to detect a shock and halt a write before the recording head is knocked far enough off track to lose the current data and destroy adjacent tracks.
