Storage Technology Corp has had to turn to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd for helical scan subassemblies for planned new tape drives. It has signed a multi-year production agreement with the Japanese company and Matsushita will provide D-3 helical-scan subassemblies, initially for StorageTek’s RedWood helical-scan storage subsystem, which is expected to go into production in late 1994. The contract is valued at more than $200m. The RedWood effort involves integrating tape subassemblies from the Panasonic arm of Matsushita with the transport and host attachments from the StorageTek tape library. The subassemblies include a tape path, helical scanner, front-end read-write electronics and tape servo system. StorageTek contributes the computer front-end channel, compression and compaction technology, buffer and buffer management and is working on a new data format for helical-scan tape, which originally was designed for video. Each RedWood cartridge will hold an estimated 25Gb of uncompressed data against the 800Mb uncompressed of a 3490E cartridge.
