History (1991): MiniStor to Pioneer 1.8-Inch HDD

Two former executives from Maxtor, Alex Malaccorto and James Miller have respectively become president and VP sales of a new company named MiniStor Peripherals Inc. (San Jose, CA) that plans to make 1.8-inch drives for laptop, notebook and palmtop computers.

After Intégral Peripherals (Boulder, CO), MiniStor is the second firm to get only involved in this mini-drive segment.

MiniStor has completed its first round of financing through Technology Ventures and San Fransisco-based Kleiner, Perkins, Canfield and Byers. Product development will be in the U.S and manufacturing in Asia headed by Joe Dibene, VP of operations.

The company expects evaluation unit of its first drive by 1Q92 and volume production for 2Q92.

Intégral’s planning is very similar but this company has already displayed a 40MB drive on a single platter at the Silicon Mountain Symposium in Colorado Springs, CO, last June.

It’s very difficult today to evaluate the possible success of these small drives. The smaller is the HDD, the higher is the price per megabyte. For a same capacity of 40MB, a 2.5-inch drive costs almost twice as much than a 3.5-inch one. It will in the same proportions for a 1.8-inch unit compared to a 2.5-inch one. This means that 1MB on a 1.8-inch drive will cost about the same price as on solid-state flash memories that are smaller and more performing than HDD.

And future sub-notebook, handheld, pen-based and organizer computer manufacturers should keep this in mind.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠43, published on August 1991.

Note: MiniStor bankrupts in 1998.