St. Paul, Minnesota (4 March 1996) -- 3M's Data Storage Products Division, which will form part of a new, publicly held, independent company to be launched this year, today announced that its LS-120 Diskette -- the new 3.5 inch diskette with a formatted capacity of 120 MB -- will be available on 2 April in North America.

In a separate announcement, Compaq Computer Corporation, Houston, Texas, said today that in April it will begin offering LS-120 diskette drives to North American users as a standard feature in the new Pentium-based Compaq Deskpro 5133-1200/LS and Compaq Deskpro 5166-2000/LS personal computers. In addition, the LS-120 drive may be ordered separately as an option for all Compaq desktop business PCs.

Compaq said availability of its PCs containing LS-120 drives in Latin America, Europe, South Africa and Asia Pacific will be announced later this year. 3M indicated its 120 MB diskettes will be available when Compaq makes these announcements. Compaq is the first PC maker to offer computers equipped with LS-120 technology. Other leading PC manufacturers are expected to incorporate LS-120 drives in their products later in 1996, according to 3M.

The four companies involved in the LS-120 technology are Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics Industries, Ltd. (MKE), Compaq, 3M and O.R. Technology. "These technology powerhouses are joining forces in an effort to deliver the next-generation floppy disk drive and provide the required support to build it into an industry standard," said Phil Devin, vice president and principal analyst, Dataquest, an industry analyst firm in San Jose, California. "If successful, they, and potentially others, could attain volumes in the tens of millions of drives."

In its North American announcement, 3M said the suggested list price for its LS-120 Diskette is $19.99. The 120 MB diskettes will be available through 3M's network of authorized distributors.

LS-120 technology provides seamless, bootable Windows 95 and Windows NT support, enabling users to employ familiar software commands. It presents users with the only commercial high-capacity diskette solution that is read and write backward-compatible to the existing installed base of 1.44 MB diskettes and 720 KB DOS-formatted diskettes.

"Backward compatibility is a major advantage of LS-120 technology," said Robert Abraham, vice president, Freeman Associates, Inc., an industry analyst firm in Santa Barbara, California. "Billions of 1.44 MB diskettes have been sold worldwide and users won't have to discard that investment as they upgrade to LS-120 technology."

Enabling users to store up to 120 MB of data -- text, graphics, audio and video -- on a single diskette, LS-120 technology offers more than 80 times the capacity and up to five times the performance of the current 1.44 MB diskette technology. One 3M LS-120 Diskette can store tremendous amounts of data -- more than 7,000 business letters, about 1,000 years of income tax return data, or more than 100 average home pages downloaded from the Internet.

"We believe LS-120 technology has a bright future in desktop systems, portable systems, workstations and servers," said Joe Phillips, business development manager, 3M Data Storage Products, St. Paul, Minnesota. "Increased capacity and performance combined with a familiar look and feel ensures that end users will be able to backup applications, store quantities of graphics and Internet images, transfer presentations and large data files -- swiftly and easily -- on a single diskette."

"This joint development effort represents Compaq's commitment to deliver the latest available technology that is both highly useful and innovative," said Jerry Meerkatz, vice president, commercial desktop division, Compaq, Houston, Texas. "The LS-120 Diskette Drive provides an affordable and easy-to-use solution to business users who need to transfer large files, or back-up or archive information. Because we believe this storage device is the new standard for diskette drive technology, we will be including it as one of the features in two Deskpro models announced today, as well as offer it as an option."

While the 3M LS-120 Diskette has the same shape and size as the standard 1.44 MB 3.5-inch diskette, it uses a combination of magnetic and optical technology to enable greater capacity and performance. Named after the laser servo technology it employs, LS-120 technology places optical reference tracks on the diskette that are both written and read by a laser system. The optical sensor in the drive allows the read-write head to be precisely positioned over the magnetic data tracks, enabling track densities of 2,490 data tracks per inch (tpi) versus the 135 tpi for a 1.44 MB diskette.

3M expects diskette drives based on LS-120 technology to be available as an internal upgrade for existing PCs as well as an external option. Additional announcements are anticipated by mid-1996, according to 3M's Phillips.

"LS-120 technology sets a new standard for removable data storage on the desktop," said Phillips. "It provides users with a new diskette solution that keeps pace with today's demanding storage requirements."

3M is the world's largest supplier of branded diskettes and other removable recording media for backup, near-line, archival and secondary data storage, data transfer and software distribution.

Copyright 1996 Imation. All rights reserved.