History (1992): Datasonix, Start-Up Focussing on World’s Smallest Tape Drive

A new company, Datasonix, was set up at the end of July in Boulder, CO, to start marketing, as of next year, a new interesting product based on Sony’s Scoopman.

With the smallest digital audio recorder in the world, it will obtain the smallest – and from far – streamer in the world.

Datasonix has just moved into Iomega’s previous buildings in Boulder.

The founders of this startup company are not unknown in Boulder, they also are veterans in the data storage industry. They are former VPs of Exabyte.

The first one is Kelly Beavers, one of the three founders of Exabyte with Juan Rodriguez and Harry Hinz, who was more recently VP WW customer satisfaction at the 8mm specialist.

The second one is Jim Greenup, previously SVP, sales and marketing at Exabyte. He is president of Datasonix, Beavers is executive VP of engineering.

For the time being, Greenup, that we had on the phone, gives few details on the shareholders of this company and on the coming products.

He confirmed that Datasonix is working on a backup unit based on Sony’s tiny Scoopman NT1 helical scan mechanism that can record a maximum of 120mn of digital audio sounds. The only change concerns the drum that will have more than the actual 3 heads, he added.

He states a capacity close to 700MB on a 120mn NTC-120 cartridge no bigger than the surface of a stamp, with a “data transfer rate as fast as the QIC format, around 5MB/mn.“

Greenup insists on the low power consumption of the unit that can work 7 hours with a simple 1.5-volt R6 battery.

Will the drive be in a form factor smaller than 1.8 inch? “Far below,” answers Greenup.

Of course, among the possible market segments for this tiny device, you can imagine integrating it as a backup unit in notebooks and maybe sub-notebooks that all require now external backup units, since they are all no smaller than 3.5 inches.

The miniaturization process already known with disks, with a model down to 1.3 inches, has not yet reached magnetic tape units.

The product should be announced at Comdex or more probably early next year.

Greenup notes that Exabyte was not interested in this product.

He gave no precision on his relationship with Sony. “We are under discussion.”

Obviously, Sony is at the knot of this project. Will the Japanese company let this Exabyte type success story come through without trying to make more profits out of it?

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠58, published on November 1992.