In line with its push towards the reseller channel, San Jose, California-based Conner Peripherals Inc is introducing five new lines of hard disk drives. They have been created specifically for sale by value added resellers and dealers and should be available late this year. First is the Derringer Series offering removable 1.8 drives for sub-notebooks and palmtops; the cards are PCMCIA Type III memory card-compatible. The first will be a 32Mb model costing $400. Second is the Sahara Series, a slim 2.5 drive designed to fit into notebook computers. The 64Mb model is $300. Third is the Baja Series for workstations and file servers. The first model – a 3.5, 1.37Gb drive – is intended to replace 5.25 drives of equivalent capacity and costs $1,800. Next is the Aegean series, also for workstations. It is a 3.5 form-factor line, and the first drive has a 545Mb form-factor. It costs $1,000. Finally, there is the 3.5 Monterey Series for desktop computers needing high storage. The first in this line is a 251Mb drive for $500. These new products follow a number of re-organisational moves by Conner, which has created two groups specifically to in crease sales in the reseller chan nel, and has hand-picked distribut ors for the US domestic market through its Medallion scheme. Con ner has also announced the formation of a new company, based in San Die go, to create and market tape back- up subsystems, and has entered into a joint development project in this field with 3M Co of St Paul, Minnes ota, as well as working with Intel Corp on Flash memory storage cards for use with handheld computers.
