History (1998): Things Working Out for Quinta

Things are working out for Quinta’s OAW (Optical Assisted Winchester), something that was confirmed by the prototype Seagate presented at its booth at Comdex.

The technology demo shown gives a good idea of what storage devices could be in the next century, on the day when the notorious superparamagnetic limit hinders further progress with the areal density of current magnetic HDDs.

The model demonstrated, code name HDA 79S, in SCSI-2 interface, sported a sealed disk drive made up of 6 plastic platters, pre-formated with pits, each one 5.25 inches in diameter, and equipped with an actuator supporting 12 magneto-optical heads, one for each side of the disks, as with a classic HDD drive.

The media is co-developed with Mitsubishi Chemical.

The unit uses only a conventional red source laser, outside the actuator, which is relayed by an optical switching module towards 1 of 12 sliders, each bearing an optical head at its end (see diagram below). The disks rotate at 4,500rpm. Transfer rate is 7.5-15MB/s.

Quinta’s executive director Norm Zimmerman reports that the access time is 10ms. Each platter has a capacity of 10GB, 5 per side, which corresponds to an areal density of 3 to 4Gb per square inch, somewhat disappointing. We expected better.

But this is only a start, of course. The company hopes to reach 10, then 20GB per square inch fairly quickly, and even 40 and 100 eventually.

No price has been mentioned, nor any launch date. “It may arrive before 2 years,” said Zimmerman.

What’s most impressive, in the end, is the simplicity of its general design, particularly when compared with that of TeraStor, which uses a clunky head and complicated cartridge. On the other hand, it will be difficult for Quinta to realize a reliable product using technologies as innovative as the laser beam switching on fiber optics on the multi-slider actuator and MEMS.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 131 on December 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: Finally Quinta was never able to produce a product and Seagate lost a lot of money in this acquisition.