History (1989): $3.5 Million Deal by Sony With US Design

The Sony Corporation of America’s Rewritable Optical Products Division (Park Ridge, NJ) announced a $3.5 million agreement with US Design Corporation (Lanham, MD) to supply US Design with 5.25-inch rewritable optical storage products, probably making the agreement the largest to date for rewritable optical products.

US Design will integrate the Sony rewritable optical disk drives and SCSI host controller boards into the company’s Q-Stor family for DEC and Sun workstation users.

It will offer three Sony based Q-Stor rewritable optical systems. The QT 650 is a single drive 650MB table-top unit designed for individual workstations. The QD 650 is a dual drive table-top system equipped with two 650MB rewritable optical drives. In the dual drive configuration, the user has on-line access to 1.3GB of memory, or the second drive can serve as a backup device for the primary rewritable optical drive.

The QS 650 is a four drive, rack-mounted or pedestal unit providing 2.6GB of online memory and full backup capabilities. Both the QD 650 and QS 650 can be used in conjunction with an individual DEC or Sun workstation, or they can serve as central mass storage devices for DEC or Sun computers acting as file servers for the entire network.

Q-Stor rewritable optical storage systems are available immediately.

The single drive QT 650 has a one unit price of $8,230 and the dual drive QD 650 and the four-drive QS 650 cost $8,723 and $10,018 respectively.

US Design’s choice is rather surprising, when you know that it is a subsidiary of Maxtor and that this latter one has its own development program for magneto-optical disk units, the Tahiti.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠18, published on July 1989.