History (1989): Sony Reaches 6.6GB, Kodak 8.2GB

Sony reaches 6.55GB, Kodak 8.2GB capacities and specs of 5.25-inch WORM disks keep improving at Comdex/Fall’89.

Plasmon Data has displayed a new 470MMB per side unit than works on a Panasonic drive.

For a list price of $3,295, Optimem offers a double unit operating with WORM disks with a total of 1.3GB on both sides of the two disks and 77ms average access times. The dual drive costs $145.

PDO has just announced that its disks will now be proposed with a 25-year warranty.

The most amazing improvements are on 12-inch WORM disks.

Toshiba had already announced 5GB and ATG 6.4GB.

Sony has just reached 6.55GB with a price hardly changing. It is announcing a 490ms average access time in CLV and 190ms in CA mode, and a 4.8 Mb/s transfer rate.

LMSI and Hitachi should follow and show a 6GB disk at AIIM exhibit in Chicago, next April.

Eastman Kodak, for its part, has reached a WW record capacity on a 2-side disk: 8.2GB on a 14-inch support. This means that its 150 optical digital disk library can now attain 1.2TB, the equivalent of 56GB per square foot.

In this WORM market, ICI, the giant in chemistry, is trying to get Digital Paper adopted in a half-inch cartridge similar to IBM 3480 to finally reach a 50GB capacity. But let’s wait for the drive before.

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.