X10 accelerated floppy drive

Infobox computer hardware generic
name = X-10 Accelerated floppy drive


caption = 10x Speed 3.5 inch drive
invent-date = 1996
invent-name = Team: Martin Bodo, Bob Rosenbloom, and two programmers
Historical reference

The X-10 Fastcache Floppy Drive was a floppy disk disk drive that read 3.5" floppies at ten times the speed of a standard floppy drive. It could read an entire floppy disk in about five seconds. [Kim, Eugene Eric. " [http://www.ddj.com/184410009 News & Views] ". "Dr. Dobb's Journal. November 1996. Accessed November 14, 2007.] The X-10 drive ran at 4x spindle speed and could write or read to both sides of the floppy simultaneously. Whenever the user inserted a disk, the drive would immediately read the entire floppy into its own custom 80188 CPU based proprietary controller card RAM. The drive used motorized ejection so it could sequence and cache writes. The drive was optimized so it could step fast enough to avoid missing tracks improving over the normal slow seek times on a standard floppy drive. The X10 Fastcache Floppy was offered for sale by Corporate Systems Center (CSC). It was priced, in 1996, at US$149 retail and US$100.00 OEM when standard floppy drives retailed at US$50.00. About 1,000 X-10 units were ever made.

References

External links

* [http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5680587.html X-10 Floppy Drive US Patent]
* [http://groups.google.com/group/misc.forsale.computers.discussion/browse_thread/thread/698abf366a99a3f/bcf462ff477ef0c1?hl=en&lnk=st&q=%22Accelerated+floppy+drive%22#bcf462ff477ef0c1 Google Groups search result of a copied X-10 writeup.]
* [http://www.digital-loggers.com/cv.html Martin Bodo' bio]
* [http://lokhmotov.com/ Sr. Engineer Igor Lokhmotov resume]
* [http://www.corpsys.com/PAGES/drivers.html#X10 Manufacturer: corpsys.com X-10 Drivers]