History (1989): Up to 50MB on 3.5-Inch Floppy Disks

The Japanese are vainly trying to establish a new standard, the 2-inch diskette used in video cameras.

Until now, only Zenith on its Minisport microcomputer has adopted the 720MB 2-inch FD originated from Matsushita Panasonic.

The next standard will probably effectively come with an announcement from IBM of a 3.5-inch diskette with a capacity reaching 4 Mbytes. Everyone was talking about it at Comdex, except IBM.

Other companies are already showing 4MB drives: Chinon, Mitsumi, Pacific Rim Systems, Teac and Toshiba. NEC even went up to 12.5MB in the 3.5-inch form factor, Toshiba and Panasonic to 16MB.

Drives for ordinary 1 or 2GB 3.5-inch diskettes are smaller and smaller. Epson’s, NEC’s and Teac’s are only 0.75-inch high. Teac’s product, the FD-334HF, less than 90z, will be in production 1990 and sold $60 to OEMs by quantities of 1,000.

Two U.S. companies, Brier Technology and Insite Peripherals, were the first ones to use a new recording technology on FDs based on optical positioning and magnetic recording. The model from Insite, the 1325VM has a 20.8MB formatted capacity. The drive will be sold for $350 to OEMs beginning 1990. Brier has developed two units, the first one with a 25MB capacity, the second one with 50MB, a record on 3.5-inch FDs, with an outstanding 35ms average access time.

Both companies’ drives can read ordinary 1 or 2MB diskettes.

Finally Citizen Watch Co., Ltd, has displayed a one-inch high 3.5-inch FDD with a 26.5MB unformatted capacity with metal-in-gap head. But delivery and price have not been determined.

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.