History (1993): Avatar, Start-Up Trying to Compete With SyQuest

Avatar Systems Corp. (Milpitas, CA) has designed a 2.5-inch hard disk drive with a removable 85MB cartridge, and another model that combines this unit with a floppy diskette drive.

The Remington ASR-80 uses a proprietary cartridge containing a rigid glass disk with 85MB of formatted storage. It turns at 3,600 rpm. The drive is available with a SCSI-2 or IDE AT interface, and a 64KB buffer. The average access time is 14 ms. The cartridge is very small, 68mm wide, 71 mm long, and only 4,4mm thick.

It can be dropped 36 feet on a hard surface without any damage, according to the manufacturer. The drive itself has a 20G shock resistance operating, and 150G non operating with the cartridge inside.

The two disk heads are loaded onto an established air bearing after drive spin-up. And by using the stored energy in the drive spindle motor, the heads are automaticaly retracted du ring all power down conditions.

The 2.5-inch unit averages 2.2W in read/write operation.

Non existent on the market until now, the Magnum ASR-80M combines the previous removable disk drive and a conventional 720KB/1.44MBe 3.5-inch floppy drive, all packaged in a one-inch high 3.5-inch form factor.

The only known customers of the small Californian company are NCR (Dayton, OH) that is supposed to use a drive for some of its high-end workstations, and Dauphin Technology (Lombard, IL) that joined Sears Business Centers to win a contract with the US Defense Department for laptops including an Avatar drive.

The company was founded in June 1991 to design and develop these drives with removable magnetic media. Its president and CEO is John Bizjak. It is based in Milpitas where are already located some big names of the data storage industry like Adaptec, Komag, Quantum, and Read-Rite.

Like all the companies entering the proprietary removable media business, the main problem is trying to make them a de facto standard by selling them in large quantities. Avatar is aiming an OEM computer manufacturer that would get involved in a start-up and a new technology only if this one can offer huge advantages compared to what is actually proposed. And even if Avatar’s products are pioneering, they are not revolutionary (see the comparison with SyQuest’s SQ2542A). And additionally, these drives will always be more expensive than standard 2 .5-inch Winchester units. Logically, notebook manufacturers should be the most interested, but they seem to prefer the PCMCIA interface, thus the 1.8-inch drives that offer removability rather than interchangeable media for which the competition is already severe between Iomega, SyQuest, Insite Peripherals and all the optical disk drive manufacturers.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 66, published on July 1993.

Note: Bankrupt of Avatar around 1999