History (1993): 428MB SSD From DEC
As fast as expansive
By Jean Jacques Maleval | October 30, 2020 at 2:07 pmDigital Equipment Corp. (Maynard, MA) is one of the rare manufacturers that is seriously investing in solid state disks, and even has a business unit in Shrewsbury, MA, entirely devoted to this activity.
Its latest model, the ESP450, with a SCSI-2 interface, has a record capacity of 428MB, in a 5.25-inch form factor. The US manufacturer announces the processing of more than 800 IO/s.
It was last November when DEC began this activity with 107 and 260MB electronic disks, the ESP510 and 530 that are part of the ESP500 family for which DEC provides a 3-year return-to-factory warranty.
This type of unit, made with 6Mb chip modules, is aimed at a small portion of workstation users with applications requiring very quick storage peripherals and that are not satisfied with the best performing ones. Here, access time is lower than 1ms.
But what ever is fast is expensive. OEM prices for these super-fast disks, depending on sales volume and capacities, range from $35 to $100/MB. In comparison, the price of 1MB on a magnetic disk is around one single dollar.
DEC’s sales of these SSDs were not yet significant as evaluation units only began shipping in March 1993, with volume shipments scheduled to start July 1993.
These products are manufactured in Colorado Springs, CO, and in Singapore.
They will be available through a network of WW distributors including Agora in Austria and Germany, COS Computer Peripherals in Switzerland, Ideal Hardware in UK, Inelco in Belgium, France and The Netherlands, Rolf Obler Industrieelektronik in Germany, Arrow Electronics, Wyle Laboratories and Pioneer in USA.
This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 67, published on August 1993.