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Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maaad who wrote (4505)	11/22/1998 8:47:00 AM
From: Herb Fuller	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10072

ALL :>>> November 23, 1998, Issue: 1136 Section: Computers & Multimedia -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Super floppies go head to head Mark Hachman Las Vegas- With both market leader Iomega Corp. and Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co. Ltd. announcing new products last week, the competition among floppy-disk-drive vendors remains stiff. Roy, Utah-based Iomega Corp. has increased the capacity of its Zip drive, curently the sales leader among high-capacity floppy drives. The new 250-Mbyte Zip will compete against newcomer Samsung, which introduced its 123-Mbyte Pro-FD last week at Comdex/Fall '98 here. For the most part, suppliers in this arena have to date sold promises but few products. While the 120-Mbyte SuperDisk-manufactured primarily by Matsushita Electric division Panasonic Industrial Co.-is established and shipping, the 200-Mbyte HiFD from Sony Electronics Inc., the 144-Mbyte UHD drive from Caleb Technology Corp., and the 130-Mbyte UHC drive from Mitsumi Corp. form a trio of products that have not yet entered the market in OEM quantities. Meanwhile, Samsung's competitive advantage is its servo-write mechanism, which will help keep media costs under $10, according to Michael Cha, sales and marketing manager for the San Jose company. The Pro-FD spins at 720 rpm, transferring data at 5 Mbytes/s. Access times were not disclosed, but the drive includes a 128-Kbyte buffer to help improve the data-transfer rate. Although Samsung expects to announce additional suppliers, the company will manufacture both the drive and media for OEMs, beginning in the third quarter of 1999, Cha said. Pricing for the drive, which also reads standard floppy disks, was not disclosed. Iomega's competitors have tried to top the Zip-drive maker with higher-capacity drives, but the decision to move to 250 Mbytes was not competitive in nature, Iomega executives said. "We've been happy with 100 Mbytes-a lot of people have used the 100-Mbyte drives," said Jon Robinson, senior product line manager for Iomega's OEM business in Boulder, Colo. "But through research and customer feedback, we decided to go to the higher capacity." That decision, he said, was driven in part by the larger sizes of multimedia and digital-image files that users download and save. The suggested retail price for Iomega's new drive, the Zip 250, will be $199. Iomega will sell the 250-Mbyte disks in packages of eight, with an average per-disk cost of $18. The Zip 250 will also read older, 100-Mbyte media. Sony's HiFD drive will begin shipping this month, said Dirk Peters, national sales manager of value-added products at Sony Electronics' Computer Components and Peripherals Group, San Jose. The drive was supposed to have shipped last spring, but the company added reliability features "to make sure our customers absolutely know their data is going be on that disk," Peters said. The HiFD will have a suggested retail price of $199, and the disk media will cost $14.99 each. Boulder-based Caleb Technology, which announced its UHD drive in December 1997, now expects to ship it in January 1999. An internal version of the UHD drive will cost about $79, and will be followed by an external version, expected to sell for less than $100, said Roger Leisy, vice president of sales for the Americas. The UHD media, in packages of three, should be priced at approximately $15.99 each. Mitsumi was unable to provide any additional information about its UHC drive.