Comdex Fall: 130Mb drives fail to surface

While Imation, OR Technology and several others showed 120Mb 'SuperDisk' alternatives to the standard floppy, the 130Mb contender first mooted by rivals at Comdex Fall 1996 seems to have ducked out of view.

Floppy drive giant Mitsumi showed what it called a "technology demonstration" of a 130Mb drive but said it had no concrete dates in mind for a product release and declined to go into further details. Last year, Mitsumi and others including Swan, said that faster performance and larger capacity would make the 130Mb floppy a serious contender against the SuperDisk and Iomega's 100Mb Zip drive.

Separately, Mitsumi had plenty of other interesting products on show, including - another demonstration product - a 20-speed CD-ROM drive that connects to IEEE.1394 (FireWire) interfaces. Mitsumi expects to sample the product in the April-June 1998 quarter and achieve volume the following quarter.

Also on the firm's stand were 32-speed CD-ROM drives, a wireless mouse with vogue-ish wheel for scrolling through documents, and both radio and infra-red wireless keyboards.