History (1988): Sabre 2HP 1150, 8-Inch HDD by Imprimis

Imprimis Technology Inc. (Minnetonka, MN), a subsidiary of Control Data, has designed the Sabre 2HP 1150, an 8-inch one billion byte disk drive for supercomputers, mini-supercomputers and supermicros.

The 97229-1150 is supplied in a standard quarter-rack form factor.

The Sabre 2HP is provided with the industry standard IPI-2 interface and provides a transfer rate of 6MB/s. Spindle synchronization support is also being introduced on this drive. The 6MB/s data rate is attained by reading from and writing to two heads simultaneously.

The splitting of the data on a write and the combination of the data on a read is done by the disk drive interface and is transparent to the disk controller and/or adapter. The data may be interleaved across the head pair using a bit, byte, or word interleave scheme.

The Sabre 2HP offers spindle synchronization. This will allow muhiple two head Sabre disk drives to be run in parallel in order to support simultaneous or synchronized reading and writing of data from two or more drives. This feature guarantees that the spindles will be synchronized within ±50 microseconds of each other, making the task easier for disk controllers with minimal impact on performance.

By running muhiple two head drives in parallel, the Sabre 2HP can be configured to achieve transfer rates of 6, 12 and 24MBs/s. The 6MB/s, two head parallel feature is provided by adding a second read write channel to the standard 3MB/s Sabre 1230 disk drive control board. This permits two data heads to be addressed simuhaneously instead of one.

The two data streams are then handled by the IPI-2 VO device level interface embedded in the Sabre 2HP disk drive so that the host controller/adapter – receives/ sends – data in a single channel IPI-2 110 mode.

The Sabre 2HP Series contains thin film media, thin-film heads and an actuator in an environmentally sealed module.

The heads are mounted on a patented straight-line arm that has substantially less mass than other designs. High-energy magnets in the balanced voice coil actuator combine with the low-mass arm provide 16ms average access.

A microcomputer controlled, dedicated, closed-loop servo system provides positioning control.

Customer evaluation units are available with production deliveries expected during 1Q89. In OEM quantities, the price is $7,040.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠9, volume ≠1, published on October 1988.