TECHNOLOGY - March 15, 1994

A Gigabyte of Caviar: The personal computer mass storage market keeps getting, uh, more massive.

Western Digital Corp. in Irvine launched a Caviar hard disk drive Monday that can store one gigabyte of data on a PC.

One megabyte can store 500 single-spaced typewritten pages. A gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes.

The magnetic drive, and its accompanying 730-megabyte version, are based on Western Digital’s Enhanced Intelligent Drive Electronics technology, which improves data transfer capabilities within a PC. The company hopes to establish Enhanced IDE as an industry standard.

Meanwhile, Irvine-based Pinnacle Micro Inc., a maker of optical disk drives, is expected today to release a 5.2-gigabyte optical disk drive that for the first time combines four of Pinnacle’s current optical drives in a single system, which sells for $14,995. Western Digital did not list the Caviar price.

The Orray drive represents a challenge to the supremacy of the magnetic hard disk drive technology, particularly makers of systems that use multiple disk drives known as disk arrays, said Scott Blum, executive vice president of Pinnacle Micro.