History (1996): Biggest HDD Yet at 23GB

As is the custom just prior to CeBIT in Hanover, all the major American HDD manufacturers have unveiled their new Spring lines.

The list includes Maxtor, Quantum, Seagate and Western Digital. Only IBM has not responded to the call.

Seagate Technology (Scotts Valley, CA) has announced a new HDD with the highest capacity on record, 23GB. It possesses the equivalent of some 35 CD-ROMs. Or enough storage for 10 or so compressed movies.

The previous record was 17GB set by IBM’s 10.8-inch 3390-9 (fat disks which did not fare well) introduced in 1993 and destined for mainframes, while in smaller devices IBM also held on with 10.8GB on 3.5-inch drives announced in 1994.

Seagate’s new Elite 23 succeeds the Elite 9 which came in at 9GB, indicating that the Californian manufacturer has every intention of following through with higher capacity 5.25-inch drives.

More specifically, it will go ahead with the ST423451 at a capacity of 23.4GB on 14 platters addressed by 28 heads.

Seagate has in fact completely revised the design of its 5.25-inch drives with the adoption of MR heads, new HDA and PCB, the addition of PRML, SMART and an embedded servo technology that eliminates the need for thermal calibration to provide better performances with AV applications. The interfaces being offered are either Ultra-SCSI or FC-AL.

No price has been mentioned yet, but Seagate indicates that the drive will have the lowest cost/MB on the market.

As with the Elite 9, the main customer is expected to be EMC with its Symmetrix units, the capacity of which can now grow 2.6 times.

Over 2GB on 2.5-inch drive Seagate is going head to head with IBM and Toshiba for its 2.5-inch form factor drives with its new Marathon models of 1,680 and 2,250 (also a new record) MB and thickness of 17mm, and 3 more devices of 420, 840 and 1,350MB measuring 12.7mm high each.

Toshiba had been, until now, the leader as far as capacity goes with 2.16GB on one drive, although at a height of 19mm. The Japanese firm had already announced a 1.35GB unit with thickness of 12.7mm and 4.25GB 3.5-inch ATA-2 unit.

In the 3.5-inch volume, the new Seagate Medalist drives with EIDE interface are based on 850MB platters, which explains capacities that reach 2.55, 3.40 and 4.25GB for units with 3, 4 and 5 disks, respectively.

All of Seagate’s units feature magneto-resistive heads, part of which are manufactured in-house, the rest acquired from outside sources.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 98, published on March 1996.