History (1988): Areal Technology With 52MB HDD on Single One-Side 3.5-Inch Platter

Areal Technology, Inc., based in Santa Clara, CA, unveiled a series of 3.5-inch fixed disk drives, the MicroDrives.

The BP-50 featured a capacity of 52.5MB formatted on a single 3.5-inch plate. This disk includes 1,720 cylinders of 60 sectors with 512B per track. The track density is 30,720bpi. The average seek time is 29ms with a disk rotational speed of 1,600rpm, offering a 7.5Mb/s data rate. Areal announces a 100,000 hour MTBF. This drive weighs 9oz. with frame. It measures 1 (H) x 4 (W) x 5.75 (L) inches. The BP-50 dissipates 1W or less.

The BP-1 00 model has about the same characteristics but the platter is used on both sides with two heads, meaning a 105MB formatted capacity.

Areal plans to double the density to reach 200MB on the two sides of a single platter.

Areal is headed by Jack Swartz, a co-founder and former CTO of Maxtor.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠11, volume ≠1, published on November 1988.