History 2002: Imation Investing Few Bucks in O-Mass

Imation has put a modest sum of money in O-Mass, a Tandberg Data company that is working on a forthcoming mid-range high-capacity tape drive cartridge.

The media manufacturer did not go crazy, investing only $5 million to be paid between now and 2003, subject to O-Mass meeting certain milestones (which were not revealed), and in exchange for a 15% equity stake in the start-up, which will thus have amassed a total of nearly $12 million since its creation two years ago.

This won’t be enough to see the project all the way through, and Tandberg is seeking other partners to offer assistance.

Even so, it’s a great deal for Tandberg, which for several months now has been looking for external financial support for its subsidiary.

The company is also banking on a major storage partner to take charge of the development of the cartridge and media in which it is specialized. OMass will focus on the drive.

As a result of the deal, in fact, the 2 partners decided on a new cartridge that is more classic, in a DLT/LTO form factor (although with greater tape width), which will be easier for Imation to manufacture, since it already manufactures similar media.

The originally-planned cartridge was nevertheless highly original, with its 2 axes aligned horizontally, thus permitting remarkable access times of 3.5s and capacity of 600GB.

O-Mass now prefers to privilege greater capacity, 1.2TB to be exact, with a new cartridge that allows for more tape surface area, at the expense of the access time, which now slows down to 80s, while transfer rate remains the same as expected, 64MB/s.

The once concern is that the arrival of the new drive, based on planar write and magneto-optical read heads, has been postponed from the end of 2003 to 2005. In that time, LTO, SDLT and Sony’s S-AIT should be much closer in specs to the first gen of O-Mass’ drive.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 176 on September 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.