History (1995): Sharp and National Semiconductor Hope to Make MiniDiscs Alternative to Floppies

MiniDisc has had a hard time taking off outside of Japan, but it is beginning to win over audiophiles.

WW sales of 1.5 million units are forecast for 1995, according to Sharp (Osaka, Japan) and National Semiconductor (Santa Clara, CA) who are joining forces to make it a new standard to replace floppy disk drives for PC and consumer applications.

Sony had already introduced a 140MB MiniDisc Data format for computer media without much success due to marginal performance and, more, its high price tag.

Sharp and National said they have designed a new lower priced drive with a reduced height of 17mm, small enough to fit in a notebook computer. The cost to OEMs will be on the order of $200 and Sharp will begin shipping samples after 1Q96. The drives will fit in a standard floppy drive slot and will be available in stand-alone configurations as well.

The device will be demonstrated at the upcoming Comdex.

Sharp will also develop the hologram pick-up unit and thin mechanism.

National has designed a special controller that multiplexes the MD Data drive interface over a standard floppy drive interface. To achieve this, the interface electronics and command control of the 2.5-inch MO unit have been moved down to an I/O chip in the PC, offloading the drive’s signal processing functions to the CPU.

In the future, the multidrive interface will be offered as a cell integrated into National’s Super I/O family of products.

Sharp said that it has developed a technique in cooperation with technology partners to increase capacity of the media to well beyond 140MB.

One concern, however, is that the transfer rate on MD drives, 150KB/s according to Sony, will not be greatly improved.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 94, published on November 1995.