History (1990): 170,000 Writable Optical Drives Shipped – Rothchild Consultants
Expected to grow to 3.5 million in next 3 years
By Jean Jacques Maleval | December 2, 2019 at 2:27 pm“There are no more than 170,000 writable optical drives in use worldwide,” this is what you can read in the Rothchild Consultants (San Francisco, CA) study named Optical Memory Report ($1,995).
It’s a review on optical drives and media, subsystems, image systems and jukeboxes. The number of these drives is expected to grow to over 3.5 million in the next 3 years.
The installed base for professional CD-ROM readers will grow from 388,000 units to 4.3 million by end of 1993.
In the 5.25-inch market, 41% of all writable drives which have been shipped are rewritable (magneto-optical) type while another 35%t are the write once type.
Rothchild also believes that more than 21,000 optical disk-based image systems (using over 50,000 workstations) have been installed, with 2,000 in USA, 18,300 in Japan and 1,410 elsewhere.
Earlier this year, the consulting firm estimated that 1,720 12-inch optical disk jukeboxes had been installed next to 797 in the 5.25-inch format.
WW writable optical drive shipments
This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠29, published on June 1990.