Milpitas, California-based Quantum Corp’s Quantum Peripheral Products (Europe) SA has launched a range of disk drives spanning the sub-notebook, personal computer and workstation markets. The smaller drives, labelled the Go.Drive GLS series, offer capacities from 85Mb to 256Mb, and measure from 0.49 to 0.75 thick. In mass production now, the models are available in 85Mb at 0.49, 127Mb or 170Mb at 0.67 or 256Mb at 0.75 formats. The drives, which offer a claimed 350,000-hour Mean Time Between Failure, include two power saving features in firmware. Autoidle, for AT-bus drives, shuts the drive down after five seconds of inactivity. This feature can be disabled in machines that already include drive control firmware. Stackwrite processes write requests before spinning up the disk to save time when the drive is in power saving mode. The drive’s firmware is upgradable using Quantum’s DiskWare downloadable firmware option. The drives also have a latch mechanism, called ShockLock, to hold the head extra steady during non-operation. Average seek times on the Go.Drive are 17mS. The new personal computer drives are called the ProDrive LPS range and are aimed at the mid-range and high-end desktop markets. ProDrive LPS customers have the choice of 127Mb, 170Mb, 270Mb, 340Mb and 540Mb models. The 127Mb version will be available in volume in the first quarter of 1994. The rest are shipping now to OEM customers and will be available through volume distribution by year-end. The company claims an increase in transfer rates of up to 60% over its existing hard drive products following enhancements to its Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Like the Go.Drive GLS range, this series of drives supports SCSI-2, but unlike the Go.Drive it handles Fast SCSI. It also supports the warring localbus standards VL-bus and Intel’s Peripheral Connect Interface bus. Seek times on the drives can reach 12mS, or 14mS on the 127Mb and 170Mb models. The final addition to the company’s product line is the Quantum Empire 1080 drive, a 3.5, 1.08Gb beast aimed at the workstation sector and shipping now. The drive, also available in a two-platter 540Mb version in October, has four disk platters and supports SCSI-3 – apparantly the committee to define the SCSI-3 standard has laid down some initial hardware guidelines and Quantum has a representative on the board. The drive, which has an average 9.5mS reading seek time, can transfer data at 4.1M-bytes per second. Quantum has souped it up with two enhancing algorithms: the Optimised Reordering Command Algorithm shuffles around commands in the queue so that the those with the shortest total access time get completed first. The Multicache technology processes multiple commands simultaneously using the drive’s segmented cache buffer. Ready for use in Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk systems, RAID the Empire will support Fast Wide Differential SCSI by the end of the year and Fast Wide SCSI in the fourth quarter 1994. One thing that all these drives have in common is a reduced component set. Quantum has tried to increase the reliability of the units by cutting down the number of parts. Consequently, Quantum claims that the Empire has up to 20% fewer parts than competing products, while the LPS drives have up to 36% fewer parts than previous generation Quantum drives. Single unit evaluation prices are as follows: Go.Drive LPS models 85Mb, 127Mb, 170Mb and 256Mb will cost $250, $300, $350 and $425 respectively. ProDrive LPS models 127Mb, 170Mb, 270Mb, 340Mb and 540Mb models will cost $260, $290, $380, $480 and $600. A 540Mb Empire drive costs $700 while a 1.08Gb version will set you back $1,000. The blitz across the board comes less than a month after it formed two new operating groups, the Desktop and Portable storage group and High-Capacity Storage Group, to focus its market impact.
