History 2003: RioSpring, New One-Inch HDD Manufacturer

Unknown until now, RioSpring is a start-up billing itself as a new manufacturer of one-inch hard disk drives, initially at a capacity of 2.4GB.

This Californian company has a manufacturing partner in China called GS Microdrive that has just inaugurated its HDD facility.

According to Masato Yokoyama, an analyst at Pixie Pinnacle: “GS-Microdrive was founded in Fall 2001 as a joint venture between RioSpring and a Rail Road Transportation equipment manufacturing company in China that wants to get into high tech. They have a $20 million investment from the Guizhou company. They are making a product that is a clone of the IBM MicroDrive. I hear that they are trying to hire 61 people in China for manufacturing. The RioSpring engineering team is a group that came from Castlewood. They founded a one-inch start up called Microstor and worked for a year at Ritek before all the people were laid off. After that, they founded RioSpring.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 181 on February 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: Born in 2002, RioSpring finally closed, having no more web site in 2007, as there was not really a market for one-inch HDDs.