Fair Lawn, New Jersey-based Insite Peripherals Inc, developer and manufacturer of the Floptical disk drive, which stores a formatted 21Mb on 3.5 floppy disks by adding an optical track to achieve more precise positioning, has had to give Hitachi Maxell Ltd a piece of the action to persuade it to become a semi-exclusive media licensee for the production of Floptical disks. Hitachi Maxell made a significant equity investment but no details were disclosed. The companies are already jointly exploring the development of next generation products with capacities of 40Mb and 80Mb drives. These future products will still also read and write standard 1.2Mb and 720Kb floppies.
