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From...
Samsung announces high-capacity floppy
November 20, 1998
Web posted at: 4:30 PM EST
by David Essex
(IDG) -- Samsung has announced a 123MB floppy drive format that it says will be cheaper than Imation's SuperDisk drive and faster than any competing high-capacity floppy drive on the market.
The Samsung Pro-FD will be backward-compatible with 720KB and 1.44MB floppy disks -- although it introduces another standard into an increasingly crowded field.
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The Pro-FD, which will fit inch-high 3.5-inch drive bays, uses a new, all-magnetic "self-servo" writing system. The drive's 5-megabit-per-second data transfer rate will be several times faster than that of competitors, according to the company. Samsung Electro-Mechanics America President Wan Lee says the big savings will come in disk media, which the company expects will be half the $10 to $20 price of competing media. Samsung is talking to several manufacturers about licensing the media technology but will make the drives itself, Lee says. The drive will arrive late next year.
Competition gets tougher
Meanwhile, Imation plans to double the SuperDisk's transfer rate to 1.2 mbps -- making it more competitive with Iomega's Zip drives. The improvements should show up by early next year, according to global marketing manager Jon Siegel. He counters Samsung's claims by saying that Imation's optical servo mechanisms are more efficient than magnetic ones, and the lack of a notebook computer size will hurt the Pro-FD's acceptance by corporations.
The SuperDisk is supported by a handful of major media and drive vendors: Matsushita (Panasonic), Maxell, and Mitsubishi. Sony and Fuji compete with their 200MB HiFD technology but have not yet shipped any products -- although Teac announced a HiFD product during Comdex. Caleb Technology announced plans for the UHD144, a 144MB drive, while Swan Instruments and Mitsumi Electric are promising the 130MB UHC 3130.
All these backward-compatible drives are vastly outsold by Zip drives from Iomega. Nearly every major computer manufacturer offers the 100MB Zip drives built-in or as an option, says Iomega Zip director Mike Lynch. And Iomega plans to offer a 250MB Zip drive for $199 by the end of this year.