Conner Peripherals
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section is in the middle of an expansion or major revamping. You are welcome to assist in its construction by editing it as well. Please view the edit history should you wish to contact the person who placed this template. If this article has not been edited in several days please remove this template. Consider not tagging with a deletion tag unless the page hasn't been edited in several days. |
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.
Contents |
[edit] Conner's HDD designs
[edit] Basic concepts
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 was more resistant to shock and less likely to warp or deform when heated.[1] 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 screws and sealed with a large, square O-ring. [1] 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.[2] 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 (of which John Squires had also been a designer), with a large amount of intelligence built into the drive's central processing unit (CPU); Conner drives used a single Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller, and ran a proprietary real-time operating system that implemented the track following algorithms (the "servo" system) in software, as well as managing the bus interface.[3] Running these functions in software 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, and track-following servos required analog components that often populated entire circuit boards of their own, thus driving up costs.
Another cost-saving measure was the ability of the drive to test itself when it was initially powered-on after being assembled in the factory. Unlike many competitive products, this required only a power connection, not a dedicated computer or test system.
[edit] Performance issues and the "Chinook" dual-actuator drive
Conner products suffered from (relatively) lower performance compared to drives that had more on-board buffer memory, or those that spun the media at speeds greater than 3600 RPM, and lower capacity compared to products that utilized zone bit recording (ZBR), to which Conner was slow to adapt. To remedy this, Conner produced a limited number of dual-actuator drives (internally called "Chinook") for high-throughput applications. These drives used the SCSI interface and had two independently controlled (by the embedded microprocessor) servo and read/write systems, and two complete sets of read/write heads. The drive firmware enabled it to dynamically re-order commands and assign them to a specific read/write system for optimum execution time, and perform read-write-verify and read-exclusive or-write operations twice as fast as comparable single actuator systems.
Chinook was limited by its physical size -- internally it used 3.5" media, but the external dimensions were those of much higher-capacity 5.25" drives. Also, RAID systems that used standard drives were dropping in price, making it simpler to use many single-actuator drives with higher capacities together rather than pay more for a smaller-capacity, dual-actuator drive. However, Conner was able to re-use parts of the design in more conventional single-actuator models, and eventually used the dual-CPU architecture to build a line of 7200 RPM drives, the CFP4207 series, in 1995.
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 was discontinued in 1999.
[edit] Relationship to modern Seagate models
After the Seagate buyout, the Conner platform was upgraded and became the basis of the Barracuda ATA, Medalist 5400 and U Series ranges. These drives run a new version of the Conner RTOS (3.x) on a new controller based around the STMicroelectronics ST10 CPU.
[edit] Corporate history
In 1990 Conner set a record by reaching $1.337 billion in sales in four years, without acquisitions, making it the fastest growing manufacturing startup in United States history.[4]
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, and was the first to produce drives with a native (no external adapter) 1394 Firewire interface.
The company started manufacturing tape drives in 1993, when it purchased Archive Corporation.
In 1996 Conner Peripherals merged with Seagate.
Finis Conner, the company founder went on to form two other companies, Conner Technology Corporation, a manufacturer of low cost 3.5" hard disk drives assembled in India, and Storcard, a company dedicating to developing a new standard in high capacity smart cards. The goal of Conner Technology was to be a high volume low cost supplier of mainstream hard disk drives to leading PC suppliers. Unfortunatley the company could never deliver the low prices required for PC supplers to switch, and the company shut down its operations in 1998. Storcard offered a 50MB floppy disk media in a smartcard based drive that was never put into production.
[edit] References
- ^ a b US patent 5029026, "Disk drive architecture", granted 1991-07-02, assigned to Conner Peripherals, Inc.
- ^ US patent 4965684, "Low height disk drive", granted 1990-10-23, assigned to Conner Peripherals, Inc.
- ^ US patent 4979056, "Disk drive system controller architecture", granted 1990-12-18, assigned to Conner Peripherals, Inc.
- ^ Langan, Patricia A., 'America's Fastest Growing Company,' Fortune, August 13, 1990
- Pollack, Andrew. "A Novel Idea: Customer Satisfaction", The New York Times, 27 May 1990, page F1.
