Conner Peripherals

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Conner Peripherals was a company that manufactured hard drives for personal computers.

Conner Peripherals was founded in 1986 by Seagate Technology co-founder Finis Conner, as a merger between a company of his and another started by MiniScribe founders John Squires and Terry Johnson, who were working on a new type of small hard disk that put the capacity of a 5.25-inch drive into the much smaller (and now commonplace) 3.5-inch format. The company was initially financed by Compaq, who was also a major customer for many years.

In its early days, the combination of technical ingenuity from Squires and Johnson combined with the sales and marketing prowess of co-founder Conner proved highly successful. The company gained a reputation for securing customer commitments prior to investing large amounts of capital into a drive design. This "sell-design-build" philosophy, coupled with a predominance of outsourced components (e.g. silicon, heads and media) gave the company a time-to-market advantage over competitors and allowed Conner to become one of the fastest growing companies in the history of the computer industry at the time. Indeed the company became a favorite on Wall Street in a few short years.

Conner's drives were notable for eschewing the "toilet bowl" type of head-disk assembly, where the disks are inside a large base casting shaped like a square bowl or vault with a flat lid; instead, they preferred the flat base plate approach, which (according to their early patents) improved mechanical stability since it was less likely to warp. Their first drives had the base plate carrying the disks, head arm and actuator enclosed inside a long aluminum cartridge, fixed to a bulkhead on the other side with two long screws and sealed with a large, square O-ring. Conner's 1/3-height (1" thick) drives used a domed, cast aluminum lid with four screws, one on each corner, sealed to the base plate with a rubber gasket. The printed circuit board was bolted to the bottom of the base plate, with the mounting holes for the drive drilled into tabs cast into the sides of the base plate. This design would be Conner's trademark look well into the 1990s. Logically, Conner's drives had some of the characteristics of the original MiniScribe drives, with a large amount of intelligence built into the drive's central processing unit (CPU); Conner drives used Motorola 68HC11 microcontrollers, and ran a proprietary real-time operating system that implemented the servos running the motors in software, as well as managing the bus interface. (This was a big deal in 1986, since it saved a lot of hardware. In 1986, most drives used a separate PID controller for the spindle, and used a CPU mainly to manage the bus interface and generate positioning pulses for a stepper motor; SCSI support added yet another CPU to interpret the SCSI commands).

In the mid-1990s, just prior to their buyout by Seagate, Conner Peripherals started using a cost-saving measure on its low-end drives. Instead of bolted-down, cast aluminum lids with rubber gaskets, Conner Peripherals came up with a design that used a thinner stamped aluminum lid, and a thick adhesive tape seal along the perimeter of the lid, where the lip of the lid meets the base casting. This design used no screws to hold on the lid — just cutting the tape could permanently damage the drive by making the lid come off. This design was kept well after the Seagate buyout, and is associated with an era where Conner drives were considered to be of poor quality.

Conner Peripherals were also one of the first companies to produce IDE specification AV (audio/visual) hard drives for a low cost such as the 420MB AV in 1995/96.

The company started manufacturing tape drives in 1993, when it purchased Archive Corporation.

In 1996 Conner Peripherals merged with Seagate.