History (1998): “We Are WW leading OEM Manufacturer of 5.25-Inch HDDs,” Stated Micropolis

In 1998 Micropolis stated: “We Are the WW leading OEM manufacturer and supplier of 5.25-Inch Winchester disk drives.”

Set up in 1977, with Stuart P. Mahon as president, the HDD maker has concentrated its resources on the development of high-capacity, high-performance 5.25-inch drives for the workstation and premium microcomputer markets.

Micropolis mostly sells HDDs to OEMs. In 1986, on the entire OEM rigid disk drive market, all formats included, Disk/Trend Inc. estimated Micropolis’ share to 5,5%, behind Seagate (18,6%), Control Data (15,3%), Fujitsu (11,9%) and NEC (6,7%).

Former year, the company has reduced its dependence on one big customer: Digital Equipment Corp.: from about 47% of revenues during the first quarter of 1986 to a current 17% of revenues, says Kidder, Peabody and Co, a technology research group.

Other big companies are also quoted as OEM customers: Altos, Apollo, Bull, Convergent, Data General, Hewlett-Packard, ICL, Motorola, Olivetti, Philips, Prime, Siemens, Sun, Tandem, Unisys, Wang, Xerox and others.

Only one is missing and not the least: IBM.

According to Communications and Information Systems Group of Alex. Brown and Sons Inc., the product has secured in Europe five major accounts: Bull, ICL, Olivetti, Philips and Siemens.

Like many other manufacturers, Micropolis started one of its factories in Singapore. It was set up in January 1986 and started producing 1320 (43 to 85MB) and 3330 series (53 to 85MB) of 5.25-inch drives. The 1320 line accounts for the majority of the revenue of the Californian firm in 1987. But the 1350/1370 series are replacing the 1320 primary product for workstation.

Micropolis also tried to enter the FDD market, but stopped its 1100 serie production in 1986. No one hears about its 1200 serie of 8-inch Winchester drives any more.

Micropolis is now focusing on design, development, manufacturing and marketing of 5.25-inch Winchester drives.

Going to 3.5-inch HDDs?
IBM announced a new 3.5-inch FD and HDD standard for PS/2 models. These products are manufactured by IBM and Seagate, one of its known OEM’s. Micropolis is not yet in this market, but is obviously working on 3.25-inch format, important for its future.

“This market is not static, and 3.25-inch drives will certainly move into 100 to 200MB range for applications that are not performance sensitive,” said Chet Baffa, SVP sales and marketing. “But for those who will require average access speed well below 20ms, small form factor, low power and capacities that begin, not end, at 182MB, this half-height drive (165011670) is ideal.’

There has been a major shakeout of small disk drive companies in the past three years. They now number a dozen and Micropolis seems to be one of the most reliable suppliers.

It has its own regional offices for USA distributions, at Mountain View, CA, King of Prussia, PA, Salem, NH). Irvine, CA. Atlamonte Springs, FA and Bedford, TX. In Europe it has HQs in England (Reading, Berkshire, and regional offices in Western Germany (Münich) and France (Evry).

While Micropolis was able to hold on longer than many of the others, it ultimately sold its HDD business to Singapore Technology (ST) in 1996, a subsidiary of Temasek Holdings, who has ceased to market the brand in 1998.[

After the disk business sale, Micropolis was reorganized as StreamLogic Corporation, which declared bankruptcy in 1997 amid securities fraud allegations. StreamLogic’s RAIDION line of storage subsystems survive, now marketed by the RAIDION Systems division of Peripheral Technology Group. Its VIDEON video on demand technology was sold to Sumitomo Corporation.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of storage Newsletter on issue ≠1, volume ≠1, on February 1988.