History (1994): IBM Havant to Manufacture Nomaï Removable Disk Drives

As we speculated, Nomaï (Avranches, France) has signed a manufacturing contract with IBM’s Havant division in UK to produce a 3.5-inch removable disk drive.

In the agreement, IBM Havant is given license to sell the disk drives.

Nomaï is already an IBM customer of magnetic hard platters. The contract should be an additional trump for the Havant plant, that is currently on the market.

The new product, called MCD (Multimedia Cartridge Drive) will use cartridges whose capacities are to be announced after Comdex. The unit will contain either 540MB, with a drive using conventional thin-film heads, or a 680MB, equipped with an MR head that could come from IBM, if the US company changed its min about not wanting to sell them.

The MCD, with an SCSl-2 interface, should have an access time of less than 10ms and turn at 5,400rpm, for a transfer rate between 8 and 10MB/s.

The drive should sell for around $500 and the cartridge for $60 to $80.

A few evaluation units have already been made and production should begin in 1995.

Hervé Frouin, GM at Nomai, insists his company is hoping the new cartridge will become a standard and the sale of licenses will be largely open to other firms. This, however, goes vs. the politics of SyOuest and Iomega.

The unit will be shown at Comdex in a private suit in the Alexis Park Resort Hotel.

It was developed, beginning in 1993, as part of an Esprit program by a European consortium including Acorn, Myrica, a laboratory, 2 British universities, IBM Havant and IBM Mainz (Germany).

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 82, published on November 1994.