Denver Ð Radiant Technology introduced in October a line of optical disk (OD) drives that will give all users a speedy backup medium and original Cube owners the chance to come in from the cold.
Featuring drive mechanisms from different manufacturers Ð Pinnacle Micro, Maxtor, and Panasonic Ð Radiant's line offers storage capacities from 128MB up to 1GB. Access times on the drives start at 19ms, making them as fast as, or faster than, many hard drives. The SCSI devices offer data transfer rates from 500KB/sec to 1.36MB/sec.
"There are lots of apps on the NeXT that require a lot of memory Ð images, databases, sound Ð and people don't want to run tape for backup because it's slow. Optical technology is unique in that it's fast and the life of a cartridge is longer than tape," said Steven Collins, sales director at Radiant.
Because NeXT's OD technology was neither fast nor reliable, original Cube owners have been waiting for OD technology to deliver on its promises. Radiant's drives should bring lots of archived data in the NeXT community back on-line and prove that ODs are a good backup medium, according to Collins.
Prices for the units will range from $1495 for the 128MB Pinnacle to $3395 for the MaxOptic 650MB/1GB dual-media drive. Other optical drive manufacturers for NeXT systems include Ten X Technology, Pinnacle, Contemporary Cybernetics, PLI, MicroNet, and Microtech International.