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SYQUEST REMOVABLE HARD DRIVE FENDS OFF FLOPPY DRIVE
ATTACK
There is a growing market for removable disk drives among
PC users. Market research firm, Disk/Trend Inc. in Mountain View, Calif.
projects 1998 unit shipments at nearly 2 million drives, for removable
cartridge hard drives.
However, Syquest Technology, Inc. of Fremont, Calif. has a problem.
It is a leader in removable cartridge hard drives, but must compete
with high capacity removable floppy drives from arch rival Iomega Inc.
of Roy, Utah. Syquest has shipped more than 2 million removable cartridge
hard disk drive systems and more than 9 million cartridges.
The Iomega Zip drive sells for around $200 but its media is a mere $19.95.
The Zip drive had a catalytic effect on a sluggish market for high capacity
floppy drives. Disk/Trend estimates the market segment shipped a little
over 200,000 units in 1994. Last year after the Zip debut in mid-1995,
the company had shipped nearly a million units according to International
Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass.
This month Syquest made its move to nullify any competitive advantage
Iomega has by announcing a new line of high speed, 3.5-in., 230 Mbyte
removable cartridge hard drives. The EZFlyer 230-Mbyte has an MSRP of
U.S. $299, and 230 Mbyte data cartridges are priced at U.S. $29.95.
The EZFlyer 230-Mbyte cartridges conform to the Power Disk Cartridge
(PDC) media standard, which is based on the removable Winchester hard
drive technology developed by SyQuest over the last 14 years.
The PDC standard, a standard ensuring physical or dimensional compatibility,
applies to single disk, 3.5-in. hard drive cartridges manufactured and
marketed today by SyQuest, Nomai, Kao Infosystems, Maxell, Polaroid
and Xyratex.
The EZFlyer is also backward compatible with SyQuest Technology’s
EZ135 drive, and can read, write and format the 135 Mbyte cartridges
from the large installed base of these popular removable drives.
The external parallel port version of the 230-Mbyte drive is now shipping
and external SCSI configurations for PCs and Macs will begin shipping
in the middle of this month.
The SCSI drive provides a maximum sustained data transfer rate of 2.4
Mbytes/second, and a burst data transfer rate of 4 Mbytes/s The parallel
port version supports high performance data transfer rates of up to
1.25 Mbytes/s, the maximum supported by the parallel port.
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