Iomega to Shrink Disks for Portable
by John Poultney
from the February 1997 issue of Australian MacUser magazine
Iomega is spinning a new scheme for portable storage: 20MB floppy disks roughly half the size of business cards. The company has shown prototypes at Comdex/Fall in Las Vegas.
The new N*hand disks will measure 48mm square and will incorporate floating read-write heads, much like Iomega’s Zip drives.
Positioning the products as OEM devices for portable electronics, Iomega said it envisions N*hand competing with flash-memory PC cards, such as those used in digital cameras. The mechanisms should be available in products by the second half of 1997, according to the company.
N*hand disks should cost less than $US20 each, or about a US dollar per megabyte, it said. By contrast, Flash memory cards range from $US20 to $US100 per megabyte.
Widespread implementation of N*hand disks will depend on adoption by third-party hardware vendors. In addition to cameras, Iomega cited PDAs, cellular phones, game machines, Global Positioning System devices and electronic books as potential hosts for the drives. According to !omega, disk-based storage will simplify the often-cumbersome process of downloading files from a portable device to a desktop computer.
Iomega said it is also evaluating whether to introduce a branded, stand-alone N*hand reader that fits in the same space as a PC Card Reader.