History (1994): Seagate Closer to IBM for HDD Capacities

At the end of January, Seagate Technology released a series of new HDDs bringing the manufacturer closer to its competitor IBM but still without using MR heads or PMRL technology.

In the 3.5-inch form factor, Seagate has now reached 4.36GB compared with 5.2GB for Big Blue.

The highest capacity is reached by Seagate with its recent 12.5mm high 2.5-inch drive with 262MB when IBM stores 270MB in a unit slightly thicker (17mm).

In the same form factor, but this time 19mm high, Seagate reaches 524MBs against 540MB in a 17mm high unit for IBM.

(1) “They provide up to 21% lower dissipation when compared with competing 2.5-inch products,” said Seagate. Idle power requirement is 0.65W
(2) Idle power requirement is 1.0W
(1) (2) Operating shock of up to 100G, 120KB multi-segmented adaptive cache. Supports the Fast ATA interlace features of programmed I/0 (PIO) Mode 3 and DMA burst data transfer rate allows PIO burst data transfer rate of 11.1MB/s, and DMA burst data transfer rate of 13.3MB/s. MTBF is 300,000 hours. 2-year warranty (except for the ST9150AG)
(3) 7,200 rpm. Sustained data transfer rate of 7MB/s. Idle power requirement is 8.8W
(4) 5,400 rpm. Sustained data transfer rate of 5.8MB/s. Idle power requirement is 9.0W.
(3) (4) 512KB multi-segmented adaptive cache. MTBF: 80,000 hours. 5-year warranty

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠73, published on February 1994.