Pinnacle's Apex 4.6GB Serves Up a Heaping Platter

Pinnacle Micro's new Apex 4.6GB drive is a breakthrough in optical-storage technology. It's currently the only drive that offers 4.6 GB of storage, the highest capacity on a single 5-1/4-inch medium. Pinnacle Micro markets this drive in both external and internal configurations; the 5-1/4-inch drive requires only a half-height drive bay.

The Apex 4.6GB external drive comes with fast SCSI-2 connectors on the rear and cool LCD and drive-activity indicators on the front bezel. The desktop model that we tested, a preprod uction model, has a list price of $1695. The Apex drive is compatible with both 2.6- and 4.6-GB media.

We did not compare the test results generated u sing the 4.6-GB media with any other drives we tested for this report, because the Apex unit is the only drive that supported the 4.6-GB capacity. We used the results that we obtained during testing with its 2.6 GB of storage capacity in our comparison with all the other 5-1/4-inch drives in the review. The results appear in the Roll Call on pages 150 and 151 (not available on-line).

Pinnacle Micro has invested considerable effort in the design enhancements for the Apex drive. The company has added more user area on the disk by designing a smaller actuary arm to seek closer to the spindle and by using a higher numerical aperture that employs a smaller bit size. This design also decreases the average seek time to 17 milliseconds, compared to more than 25 ms.

All these desirable features make the Apex 4.6GB an innovative, breakthrough optical drive with superior performance and enormous capacity. The Apex 4.6GB could be an alternative to a magnetic hard drive due to its reliability, 30 years of ar chival shelf life, portability, and large capacity. It also comes with a one-year warranty and a $395 extended warranty.

Pinnacle Micro is still upgrading the performance and compatibility of the drive for its final release, which was scheduled for March. The Apex 4.6GB drive should be well into production by the time you read this article.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

Apex 4.6GB drive................$1695

Pinnacle Micro
Irvine, CA
Phone:    (800) 553-7070 or (714) 789-3000
Fax:      (714) 789-3150
Internet: 
http://www.pinnaclemicro.com


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Near-Hard-Drive Performance

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Using a single-write-pass technology, Pinnacle Micro's Apex 4.6GB rewritable magneto-optical drive offers near-hard-drive performance and has a low per-megabyte cost.