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History (1997): Syed Iftikar Comeback with Castlewood and 2GB One Platter Drive

$200 for HDD cartridge drive

Malicious tongues will wag about the fact that Syed lftikar, the founder and former president, CEO and COB of SyQuest Technology, from which he was deposed, had the habit of announcing products that were not always released, or too often with major delays.

Of course, one could say that, in contrast, all too conscious of past errors, lftikar will not repeat them, and therefore is worthy of our confidence. His new company, founded in September 96, is called Castlewood Systems (he explains that the “Castle” comes from Castle Rock Motion Pictures, while “Wood” comes from Kenwood, the idea being to link a Hollywood studio with a specialist in sound, for a range of multimedia products).

The first such product, named ORB, is naturally a removable cartridge drive.

 Castlewood

And an impressive one at that, since it is capable of holding 2.16GB in a cartridge which contains only one 3.5-inch disk, and which costs only $200 for an external paral1el port or SCSI version ($30 for the cartridge). There will also be an IDE model.

This capacity is attained thanks to the use of MR heads, practically a first in removable drives (the 4.7GB Quest from SyQuest uses DSMR heads). With fairly high areal density as well, environmental risks accrue as a result.

We have adopted a system with 2 filters, one in the cartridge, as with Iomega, and another in the drive, as with SyQuest,” said lftikar.

Other specs are where they should be: average seek time of 10ms (read) and 12ms (write), 5,400 rpm, data transfer rate of 6.8MB/s minimum, MTBF of 300,000 hours.

The company forecasts shipping 4 million units next year. Behind this first product is another one, even more interesting, which Castlewood will call M-DVD, based on one cartridge still with only one 3.5-inch platter, but this time with 4.7GB, exactly the capacity of the first optical DVD-ROMs, and according to lftikar, coming soon, in June ’98.

With such a product, the company plans to enter the mass consumer market for multimedia. At Castlewood’s Comdex booth, a Sanyo VCR ran not a VHS magnetic tape, but ORB disk cartridge.

While some may object that a disk for $30 is much more expensive than the standard VHS cassette which costs less than $1, the former nonetheless offers an operating comfort that is undeniably superior.

Castlewood Systems is based in Pleasanton, a town situated at the intersection of California Routes 550 and 650, to the east of San Francisco, CA. lftikar is proud to report that he did not need VCs to finance his concern. He relied only on mainstream investors, among them the Japanese company Sanyo, the German PC manufacturer Vobis and TransCapital, an Asian firm that owns Xolox and which serves as Castlewood’s manufacturing arm in Penang, Malaysia.

He has already planned Castlewood’s IPO: it will be in July or August of next year, and the operation will be organized by Solomon Brothers.

Among the firm’s current 44 employees are two SyQuest veterans, Santokh Singh, VP engineering, and Thomas Su, director of engineering. Martin Fishman, the former president of Computerland, is the VP of WW sales, and David Swanson is the director of marketing.

In addition to lftikar, the board is made up of Ken Hardesty (DMT, Komag, Seagate), and as board advisor Robert Wilson (who was notably CEO of Memorex), along with Jay Hassan, president of the global interconnect systems division of AMP.

It comes as no surprise in the removable HDD media world: Castlewood had not even announced its new product before SyQuest brought suit vs. it. The lawsuit was filed last June in the Santa Clara County Superior Court for misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of fiduciary duty, unfair competition and constructive trust.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 119 on December 1997 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: Castlewood filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and ceased operation in 2004.

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