New Removable Storage Options - GigaMO and Orb

GigaMO

GIGAMO is a the name of a new high-capacity removable storage format co-developed by Fujitsu and Sony. It uses a technology called MSR (magnetically induced super resolution) to store up to 1.3 gigabytes on a disc similar to those used in previous generations of 3.5" MO drives. In fact, the drive is read/write backward-compatible with 128, 230, 540 and 640 MB 3.5" disks.

The drive, currently manufactured exclusively by Fujitsu, is expected to show up over the next few months in the FireWire MO drive from VST and, presumably, forthcoming products from Fujitsu, Sony and other as-yet unannounced licensees.  The drives, currently available only as a bare SCSI mechanism for integration into other systems, went into volume production in Feb. 1999.  OEM sample price is 80,000 yen; volume production are expected to be lower.  Media pricing is not known at this time, although Fujitsu promises "an even lower cost per MB than previous generations of MO disks."

Tech Specs:

• Transfer rate: up to 5.9 MB/sec
• Capacity: 1.3 GB
• For more information: Fujitsu Europe or Fujitsu Japan

Orb

Finally hitting the market is the Orb drive, from Castlewood Systems. This 2.2-Gbyte removable media drive is currently available in EIDE configurations only. However, Castlewood is reportedly planning to release internal and external SCSI versions by the end of March and could have an external parallel configuration as early as May. Although not announced, Universal Serial Bus and FireWire models are also expected in the July time-frame. One of the primary attractions of the Orb is its low-cost media. Disks have a suggested retail price of just US$29.95, about 80 percent less than the cost of competitive media, driving the cost of rewritable storage to a new low of $0.0138 per megabyte.

ORB removable media hard drives are, says the company, the first universal storage systems to be built using cutting-edge magnetoresistive (MR) head technology, first developed by IBM. Thanks to MR technology, Castlewood claims ORB drives have an estimated mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) rating 50 percent better than competitive removable media drives (presumably a reference to SyQuest's notoriously unreliable SparQ drive). The Castlewood website provides additional details.

Tech Specs:

• Transfer rate: up to 12.2 MB/sec
• Capacity: 2.2 GB.

For more information: www.castlewood.com

For Additional Reading:

• Canadian Computer Wholesaler: Removable Storage The Logical Alternative
• TCP Online: Storage Product Reviews