History (1989): 5.25-Inch HDDs at Comdex/Fall’89

One dollar per megabyte came less than a decade ago, at the National Computer Conference, Seagate was displaying a Winchester drive in a 5.25-inch full-height format, the ST506 model, with a 120ms average access time and a 5Mb/s transfer rate. For the price of an ST506 in those days, $1,500, you can now buy a 20MB HDD, and the computer is offered extra.

Now, in this same form factor, Hewlett Packard, Imprimis, Hitachi, Maxtor, Micropolis, and NEC can store up to 1.6MB with access times ranging from 10.5 to 14ms.

In fact, most of these 1.6GB drives are 1.2 ones improved with ZBR (Zone Bit Recording) technology launched by Imprimis. 1.2GB with an ESDI interface and 1.6GB with an SCSI one can be expected.

Most of these high-end devices won’t be available before next year.

The price of Micropolis’ 1528 models is now $2,995 in OEM quantity.

Micropolis 1528

But, according to Jean-Marie Berland, Micropolis director European OEM sales, “When this unit is in full production (which is scheduled for 2H90), prices will drop from $1,500 to $1,600, which means 1$ for 1MB, a historical event in the Winchester business.”

The MTBF race over these drives is keeping on, Fujitsu reaching 200,000 power-on-hours.

These 5.25-inch drives are going to measure up with 8 to 14-inch disks of high-end computers. Imprimis keeps on in the 8-inch format with the 2.5GB Sabre 2500 ($6,595 to OEMs) and NEC is launching a new 9-inch 3.1GB drive.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠22, published on November 1989.