History (1991): ATG Beats WW Record of Capacity Into One Single Optical Disc Platter

At CeBIT in Hanover Germany, ATG Gigadisc (Toulouse, France) displayed a disc with a storage capacity never reached before: 9GB or 4.5GB per side.

On a 12-inch optical platter, it buries Optimem (3.9G), a subsidiary of the US company Archive and leaves behind LMSI (5.8GB), a subsidiary of Philips and even all the large Japanese companies like Sony (6.5GB) and Hitachi (7GB). And it isn’t good news for Kodak’s 14-inch 8.2GB disk.

The new WORM support offers a capacity 40% higher than its 6.4GBe predecessor from ATG, and will cost 12% more, FF7,448. The new Gigadisc 9001 drive will be sold for FF216,000, 20% more than the precedent Gigadisc 6000/6001.

A partial upward compatibility is assured since former discs can be read (but not written) on the new drive.

Except for an increased capacity, the specs of the 9001, mounted in a 19-inch rack, have hardly changed with an access time of 90ms to reach one sector plus a 33ms latency time, a 1MB/s transfer rate, a SCSI-1 or 2 interface, and a 30,000-hour MTBF.

Volume production is scheduled for the end of the second quarter.

An automatic 5-disc loader should also soon be produced by the French manufacturer. On account of these 9GB disks in MCAV mode, Cygnet’s largest jukebox configuration sold by ATG will be able to store up to 1,269GB on just 2 square meters of floor space, with an average 10s access time to reach one information.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 39, published on April 1991.