Event Coverage

HardwareZone's 10th Anniversary: The 1998 - 1999 Era

Events from the Storage World: 1998 - 1999

Events from the Storage World - 1998

 

  • Syquest, who previously had a large share of the removable hard disk market, found itself challenged by Iomega and Superdisk. They eventually filed for bankruptcy and were subsequently acquired by Iomega a year later.
  • Iomega themselves were facing problems of their own, namely dwindling sales, competition from Superdisk, and more seriously, reliability issues with their disks. This, coupled with the proliferation of recordable optical discs, and later USB flash drives meant that Iomega probably never had the chance to recover its once glory days.

In addition, Zip drives were not as ubiquitous and cheap as one would have liked. More computers had optical drives installed than Zip drives; and in terms of cost per megabyte, rewritable discs were overwhelmingly cheaper and all of this made Zip disks an unattractive option from this time frame moving forward. They were definitely a hit when they first arrived, but competing technologies and simpler storage options won back the consumers once these had the capacity and cost advantage.

  • 1998 also saw the birth of one of the world's first hard drives to employ Giant Magneto-Resistive technology (GMR) - the IBM DeskStar 14GXP 14.4 GB . We had one in our labs and we were pleased by its performance. Not only did it offer huge capacity (at that time), it was also fast and quiet. If there was anything we didn't like, it was its price - S$798.

Events from the Storage World - 1999

 

  • These days, memory cards have become part and parcel of out daily life in some way or another and are omnipresent in several of our daily gadgets. However, Secure Digital, arguably the most popular and widely used format now, was born in 1999. Over the next few years, it will spawn smaller, higher capacity varieties such as the SDHC and microSDHC vairants
  • Even with memory cards, storage drives are still a popular means of transporting large amounts of data. One popular format that was often sought after for reliable large capacity storage back in 1999 was magneto-optical drives and we had a Fujitsu DynaMO 640SD/1300SD in our labs for testing.

 Back in the days when optical storage was still in its infancy, and no one has ever heard of a thumbdrive, Fujitsu's magneto-optical drives were the primary means of transferring large amounts of data.

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