Regarding Symbios: Here's some interesting news about their data controller. Any technical people out there have any idea if this could/couldn't work with Zip?
Symbios Chip Doubles Hard Drive Performance
Received: October 02, 1996 06:23am EDT From: PC Week
From PC Week for September 30, 1996 by Scott Berinato
Symbios Logic Inc. last week announced it will ship a new hard disk
drive data controller that the company claims can move data on and off
the disk twice as fast as any controller on the market today.
Equipped with an Ultra2 SCSI interface, the SYM201F40 supports data
transfer rates of up to 80M bytes per second, said officials of the Fort Collins, Colo., company.
The controller chip also has a buffer bandwidth rate of 125M bytes per
second and receives data from the media read/write channel at 320M bps. These speeds were achieved by combining a Wide Ultra2 SCSI interface with low voltage differential transceiver technology, according to Symbios officials.
"This is a welcome technology, especially for large networks where you
have streaking data performance requirements," said Bob Abraham, an
analyst with storage market researchers Freeman and Associates, in Santa Barbara, Calif. "This will become a high-end standard in performance pretty soon."
"This product will continue to give Symbios a major presence in the SCSI market," said Jim Porter, chairman of Disk/Trend Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., market research company.
Symbios is in OEM negotiations with two hard disk drive vendors that are considering embedding the technology in their next-generation drives, a company spokesman said.
The chips cost $20 at current prototype production levels and will drop to $15 when high- volume production levels are reached, which officials expect to happen in the fourth quarter. Symbios also intends to enter the CD-ROM drive electronics market in 1997, one company official said. |
