IBM Announces Record-breaking Notebook Hard Drives
First Storage Devices to Incorporate Drive Fitness Test Technology
San Jose, Calif. (October 22, 1998) – IBM today announced the highest capacity notebook computer hard disk drive for premium notebook computers. It holds 14.1-gigabytes (GB) or about four times as much information as the average notebook hard drive contains today.
Travelstar 14GS does not weigh much more than a baseball yet it can hold all of the double-spaced typed text on a stack of paper 2,338 feet high. Placed end-to-end, these sheets of paper would stretch 1,218 miles, farther than the distance between New York City’s Yankee Stadium and Busch Stadium in St. Louis, MO.
It is one of a family of three record-breaking hard disk drives for mobile PCs introduced today by IBM.
“This drive is sure to be popular with the road warriors who depend on their notebook computers. These users can now take an enormous amount of information and capability with them on the road,” said Bill Healy, general manager of IBM Mobile Storage Products.
The 17 mm-high drive is not much thicker than a cassette tape, yet it can hold more than 10,000 1-megabyte (MB) digital photographs, 140 CD-ROM programs of 100 MB each or several hours of MPEG-2 video.
Ultra-portable solution
IBM also announced today Travelstar 6GN, the world’s highest capacity 9.5-mm hard drive for ultra-portable computers. The slim and lightweight 6.4 GB Travelstar 6GN sets a new world record in hard drive areal density. It holds the most bits (5.7 billion bits) per square inch of any hard drive.
With a higher areal density, a drive generally is more reliable and lower cost. IBM’s microdrive, the world’s smallest hard drive announced last month, held the previous world record at 5.1 billion bits per square inch.
Mainstream users
IBM is also offering a new 10 GB drive for the mainstream notebook PC. Travelstar 10GT is only 12.5-mm high yet it can hold the text of more than 9,000 200-page novels, or about the equivalent of the contents of a small bookstore. It is the highest capacity drive in this class and brings the advantages of high-capacity storage to the broadest range of notebook users.
All of these new Travelstar drives are the first in the world to incorporate IBM’s new Drive Fitness Test (DFT) technology. DFT lets users easily and quickly test the health of their IBM hard drives.
Research shows that the majority of the time when hard drives are sent in for replacement because a problem is suspected, the drives are fine. DFT can reduce this unnecessary inconvenience of returning a healthy drive. It is stored in a “secret compartment” on the drive, and can be invoked even if the PC’s system software is not working properly.
Source: IBM