History (1989): 16MB on Panasonic Floppy Disk Drive

Panasonic Industrial UK (Slough, UK) introduced a new 3.5-inch FDD offering a capacity of 16MBs with a linear recording density of 35,000bpi and a track density of 542tpi.

It has 640 tracks on both sides. To increase the track density, a micro stepping motor with an encoder has also been developed as a head positioning actuator. This realizes high vibration resistance, high-speed access, accurate positioning and low-power dissipation.

This FDD, with an embedded SCSI, a built-in exclusive controller and encoder with a micro stepping motor, has a self-format function to allow the user to initialize physical format.

It is possible to read out conventional 3.5-inch disks.

Dimensions are 41 x 101.6x 150mm and weight is 680g.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠16, published on May 1989.