More info about Sony HiFi
Floppy Stores 200MB
By Karen J. Bannan
October 21, 1997 2:07 PM PDT
PC Week
Sony Corp. and Fuji Photo Film Co. last week announced a 3.5-inch, 200MB floppy disk system that could challenge Iomega Corp.'s Zip drive.
The HiFD (High-Capacity Floppy Disk) system, co-developed by the two Japanese companies, is backward read/write-compatible with current 3.5-inch, 1.44MB floppy disks and is being targeted at the low-end optical storage market, Sony officials said.
The announcement of HiFD marks a new benchmark in low-end optical drive performance, since it is expected to achieve read transfers of 3.6MB per second and write transfers of 1.2MB per second. Iomega's Zip drive has a read/write transfer rate that ranges between 0.79MB and 1.44MB per second; current 1.44MB floppy drives have a rate of 0.06MB per second.
Iomega plans to ship later this year the ZipPlus drive, which is expected to boast speeds up to 40 percent faster than the original Zip drive, Iomega officials said.
Iomega is the low-end storage market-share leader, with its Zip drive garnering an estimated 87 percent of low-end magnetic storage sales in 1997, according to International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass.
"Sony is a major drive manufacturer, and it plays in most key market segments," said IDC analyst Wolfgang Schlichting. "Fuji has a reputation in media, so it seems to be an excellent match for a new floppy format."
The HiFD will ship to OEMs and aftermarket resellers in the spring of 1998, said officials at Sony Electronics, in San Jose, Calif.
Alps Electric Co. and TEAC Corp. have signed on to license and sell their own versions of the Sony/Fuji technology. Sony expects more licensees in the near future.
Although pricing has not been finalized, Sony officials expect the HiFD to be "very competitive" with products already on the market. A low price could start a war in the optical storage market, said IDC's Schlichting.
I heard also that Syquest will introduce a Syjet 2 which should have twice the capacity later this year but I suspect that Syquest does not have the development resources to produce another product. I also think their EZ Flyer line is a dead product and will be obsoleted inthe near future. |
