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• Acronym: MagDrive
• ESPRIT Project #9257

Participants

• Nomaï SA [F], Co-ordinating Partner
• Myrica (UK) Ltd [UK], Partner
• Acorn Risc Technologies [UK], Partner

Objective

The objective of this ESPRIT project was to develop a removable cartridge magnetic disk drive for use in all forms of computer. The initial goal was to achieve a capacity of 400MB per cartridge, but it soon became apparent that this could be increased to 540MB using the technology becoming available.

The areal storage density required to achieve this capacity on a single 95mm disk was 360 Mbits per square inch, and this necessitated the successful application to a removable system of 2 state-of-the-art technologies that started to appear in conventional fixed magnetic disk drives: Magneto-Resistive (MR) heads and Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML) data channels.

Both of these new technologies, along with several existing techniques, have been developed further within the project to accommodate the particular environmental, mechanical and ergonomic requirements of removability. In addition, other important issues that had to be tackled included:

• misalignment between written and read back data when cartridges are moved from drive to drive, yielding off-track errors and skew-induced signal degradation
• increased exposure of the sensitive head and disk to contaminants
• lifting of the heads onto and away from the disk – without degrading the extremely precise flying characteristics – to allow insertion and removal of the cartridge

The final goal was a drive that had been exhaustively tested, and, in comparison with existing solutions, offered improvements in seek time (<12ms), transfer rate (10MByte/sec), size (25mm high) and price (average user cost < $0.6/MB).

Results

The MagDrive project, which ran from January 1994 to December 1996, pulled together some of the remaining pockets of disk drive knowledge in Europe and succeeded in developing a high capacity removable cartridge magnetic disk drive, for particular use in multimedia applications.

The first year of the project saw tremendous progress, resulting in prototypes being demonstrated at trade shows only 9 months into the project. The second year brought much steadier progress, as a succession of minor electrical and mechanical issues hampered the transition from prototype to fully working product.

The final 6-month period produced steady improvements in all areas, resulting in ability to ship over 1,000 drives – and many more cartridges – for evaluation. All of the individual aspects of the drive had been fine tuned, and we were able to demonstrate full backwards compatibility with SyQuest cartridges – an important marketing tool.

A partnership with Xyratex proved most useful, as they installed a world-class disk drive manufacturing line for us in Havant (UK), which was producing increasing numbers of drives each day. This arrangement impressed potential customers and garnered favourable press comment.

Demonstrations of finished products were met with much favourable interest and large shipment volumes soon commenced so as to meet all the orders from OEMs, distributors and major customers.

As a result of the project's success, Nomaï were voted a Winner of the 1995 Information Technology European Awards.

Information Dissemination Activities

The promotional activities for the “MCD” (Multimedia Cartridge Drive) accelerated through 1995, by means of demonstrations of the product at numerous trade shows around the world and discussions with a large number of prospective customers, distributors and dealers. The goal was to establish the MCD as a world-wide standard for interchange and off-line storage of multimedia data.

To augment this, Nomaï announced at CeBIT an agreement with SyQuest – the leader in this niche market– to ensure cross-compatibility of the two companies' products. Both commenced work with ECMA and ISO to set up the product range as an official ISO standard.