History (1994): Fujitsu First to Announce 230MB Magneto-Optical Drive

Fujitsu is the first company to announce 230MB magneto-optical (MO) drive since MOST has launched a device with a 384MB capacity at last Comdex.

But it’s the first drive complying with the new ECMA standard that will probably be adopted by nearly all the manufacturers.

So there will probably be a flood of announcements from all of Fujitsu’s competitors in the coming weeks.

But the true competition could come from SyOuest and its S03270 3.5-inch model with a removable 270MB cartridge. This drive has a better performance and is much cheaper than an MO 230MB unit. The magnetic media should nevertheless cost 50% more than the MO media with a capacity 17% higher.

Thus, with the M2512A, Fujitsu Deutschland GmbH (Munich, Germany) presented on January 17 the industry’s first 3.5-inch magneto-optical disk drive with a formatted storage capacity of 230MB and a SCSI-2 interface. The M-O device complies with the ECMA-201 standard passed by the European Computer Manufacturers Association on December 10, 1993. It can read and write 128MB previous media and features the same one-inch profile.

Data transfer rate to/from media is 2.1MB/s. With an integrated 237KB write cache, transfer rates of 3.3MB/s (asynchronous) and 5MB/s (synchronous) may be reached in the burst mode. These rates are made possible mainly by the spindle rotation speed of 3.6OO revolutions per minute.

Average seek time is 35ms. Power consumption of the M2512A is 7W and an integrated power management reduces the energy spent. It requires a single 5V power source and no additional 12V.

Besides high-end PCs and Macintosh systems, the drive can now also be used for Unix workstations whose file systems require a minimum capacity of 200MB.

Thomas Roth, marketing director of Fujitsu Deutschland GmbH, sees new applications for MO drives in addition to the standard ones: “Already by now, we can see an increasing use of optical storage media in graphics studios and photosetting shops. We also have obvious growth rates in the fields of desktop publishing, radio and TV broadcasting. Fast and high-capacity solutions like the M2512A will allow interesting applications in the audio and video sectors.“

Volume production of the new disk drive will begin in Kumagaya, Japan in March 1994.

The model M2512A will be available in Germany as of April this year.

“Price will be about 30% higher than for the 128MB drive in the beginning,” said Roth.

He added that Fujitsu was waiting for the final specs of the standard before announcing its drive.

According to Roth, Dataquest ranked the Japanese company number one in the classification of 3.5-inch MO drive manufacturers with 32% of the WW market.

At next CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, Fujitsu Deutschland will unveil the name of its two next large OEMs for this new product.

Double capacity media will be available from Fujitsu and all the 3.5-inch MO media manufacturers that will soon announce these 230MB disks.

Suggested retail price of the M2512A is FF9,200 in France.

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.