St. Paul, Minn. (March 27, 1995) -- 3M today announced its TR-1 minicartridge -- the first in a series of new high-capacity tape products that will incorporate the company's patented Travan™ technology.

The TR-1 minicartridge provides users with 400 MB of native storage capacity, more than doubling the capacity of the industry's top selling QIC-80 minicartridge.

The suggested list price of 3M's TR-1 minicartridge is $47.50. The product is expected to be available about May 1 through 3M's worldwide network of distributors and resellers.

Introduction of the minicartridge follows recent announcements by several leading quarter-inch cartridge companies -- 3M, Hewlett-Packard's Colorado Memory Systems Division, Conner Peripherals, Iomega, Rexon, and Sony -- to manufacture tape products based on Travan technology.

The Travan platform features a unique drive/minicartridge interface that is included in a patent application filed by 3M.

The TR-1 contains 750 feet of .315-inch high-coercivity 550 oersted (Oe) gamma ferric oxide media and has a data density of 14,700 flux transitions per inch (ftpi). The minicartridge subsystem utilizes a floppy interface and has a transfer rate of 500 Kb/s. 3M's new product requires no changes in media formulation, and will use existing drive electronics and available head technology.

Keeping Pace with Disk Capacities
"Travan technology eliminates the imbalance that historically has existed between tape and hard disk capacities," said Michael J. Stevens, director of business development, 3M Data Storage Tape Technology Division. "The capacity multiplier provided by the TR-1 minicartridge will be particularly beneficial to the millions of home and small office PC users who now regularly download large data files and storage-intensive images from commercial online services -- without sacrificing their free hard disk space in the process.

"With Travan technology, users have access to a cost-effective storage management solution with the same capacity as their hard disk. Next-generation Travan minicartridges call for taking QIC applications well into the client/server and network markets."

In addition to keeping pace with hard disk capacities, Travan technology will enable the industry to better support emerging software applications like Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) on the desktop and Windows95 applications, Stevens added.

"It's not everyday that an industry takes a significant leap forward, while maintaining backward compatibility," said Bill Frank, president of Augur Visions, a market research firm in Los Altos, Calif. "Travan technology should be welcome news to millions of PC users."

According to Dataquest, a market research firm in San Jose, Calif., home PC sales accounted for nearly 32 percent of the 5.6 million PCs shipped in the U.S. during 1994 -- up more than 28 percent over 1993. Similarly, PC penetration of U.S. homes increased from 27 percent in July 1994 to 31 percent in January 1995, a recent study by Odyssey Home-Front, Inc. revealed.

The growth in on-line usage over the past year has been equally brisk. According to PC Magazine, the number of subscribers using America Online -- the country's largest commercial online service -- increased by 500,000 to almost 2 million in the past year alone.

Future Development Efforts
3M, Hewlett-Packard/Colorado Memory Systems Division, Conner Peripherals, Iomega, Rexon, and Sony plan to continue working on future development of the Travan drive and recording formats to assure further expansion of the market for tape-based applications.

The companies developing drives based on 3M's Travan platform are working with the QIC (Quarter-inch Cartridge) organization to develop a migration path that incorporates the Travan cartridge and drive formats.

In addition to the modified QIC-80 format represented by 3M's TR-1 cartridge, the migration path will include a modified QIC-3010 drive/cartridge with a native capacity expected to be 800 MB (now 340 MB). The capacity of the modified QIC-3020 drive/cartridge is expected to be 1.6 GB (now 670 MB). There are also plans for the 1995 introduction of a Travan minicartridge with a native capacity of 4 GB. Most drives will offer 2:1 data compression, which will double the native capacities.

Each point on the Travan migration path is expected to represent at least a two-fold increase above all previous capacity points. Forward compatibility with the installed base of 200 million QIC-compatible minicartridges -- a critical need for users wanting to capitalize on their investments in QIC technology -- will also be assured at each convergence point, 3M's Stevens noted.

The Travan platform optimizes available space in a 3.5-inch drive form factor housing. Mechanical changes will enable the drive to accept current QIC-minicartridges, QIC-Wide and Travan cartridges.

Data cartridge technology, invented and patented by 3M, is the world's most popular desktop tape backup technology and boasts an installed base of more than 11 million drives, with three million drives shipped in 1994 alone, demonstrating the rapid market growth of QIC technology.

3M is the world's largest manufacturer and marketer of branded minicartridges.

Travan is a trademark of 3M/Imation.
QIC-Wide is a trademark of Sony.

Copyright 1996 Imation. All rights reserved.