Tokyo-based Teac Corp, a veritable giant in the floppy disk drive world, is breaking into the CD-ROM drive market with a clutch of products. It admits it is a late-comer to this market but says that as CD-ROM drives will eventually affect its bread and butter business, it wants a piece of the action. And to enter the market at a growth point, it has by-passed, with one exception, dual-speed CD-ROM drives and gone straight to quad-speed drives. It says that in 1995 it expects to be shipping 100,000 quad speed drives a month. The Teac-Stor, a high speed removable hard drive in standard half height is aimed at users requiring high capacity storage of video images and sound. It comes in three capacities, 250Mb, 360Mb and 540Mb, and can run under a selection of operating systems. Also, Teac says companies with few personal computers but multiple users can make use of the Teac-Stor. It costs UKP530. The CD-55AK is a quad speed drive with a plug-compatible interface to all SoundBlaster boards and Teac believes it will be attractive to the upgrade market. It is described as a halfway house to a Digital Audio Tape and comes in a retail package with all necessary drivers and software for it to be installed. This is a novel concept for Teac, which has hitherto concentrated on the OEM market up until now. Teac boasts that it only took its Japan-based research and development division one year to bring the product to market, but admits it took considerable manpower and money. It is available now for UKP300. There is also a version with an Enhanced IDE interface and Teac will use this to atack the mass market of persnal computers. This costs UKP300. The dual speed CD-40 has been designed for the laptop market and Teac claims it is the smallest, lightest, CD-ROM drive available, weighing 1 lb. This will be an OEM product only and is available from January. Teac has its history in magnetic tape. It established its data storage division 18 years ago and its first products were floppy disk drives, and it still sells 1m a month, but on the back of its tape expertise it developed tape streamers and hard disk drives. Now it is working on faster CD-ROM drives, read-writable CD-ROM drives and some PCMCIA-type products, although it says it is ambivalent about this technology. It established its German and UK data storage product divisions in 1991 and 1992 respectively.
