Olympus Image Systems Inc. announced for demonstration at Seybold Expo the SYS.230 Internal Mac Personal Storage System, a 230 MB rewritable 3.5" optical drive.

The SYS.230 Internal Mac is the lowest priced rewritable optical drive for the Macintosh at $319. It joins the recently announced new line of low-cost SYS.230 Personal Storage System products from Olympus.

The SYS.230 Internal fits into an open 5.25" drive bay in Apple Macintosh towers. It is based on Olympus' own third generation MOS330E drive mechanism. The SYS.230 system's RPM, seek time and data transfer rates are the fastest for rewritable 230 MB drives. It has a sustained data transfer rate of up to 2.4MB/sec and an effective seek time of less than 17 msec. The SYS.230 drive spins at 4200 RPM, but also includes 256 Kbytes of cache memory and Olympus' sophisticated ECA) (Enhanced Cache Algorithm) to maximize burst transfer rates, providing a performance boost equivalent of 300 RPM, giving it an effective speed of 4500 Rpm.

"It is exciting to be able to provide popular rewritable optical technolog at such an aggressive price," said Bill Boles, vice president sales & marketing, Olympus Image Systems Inc. "We expect the SYS.230 drive to extend optical storage popularity into the mass Macintosh market. This announcement comes on the heels of the SYS.230 Internal for Windows introduced last month."

The award-winning SYS.230 line of portable storage drives was recently introduced. It includes the SYS.230 Internal for Windows, and external models for SCSI and combination parallel/SCSI. The drive features Olympus SFP (Super Fine Positioning) optical pick-up technology, which was specially designed for this new compact/low-cost Olympus drive (further detail is available). SFP is the world's fastest optical pick-up used in magneto-optical drives, and is the enabling technology which allows the SYS.230 system to be reduced both in size and cost, while maintaining performance leadership found in earlier Olympus optical drives.

The SYS.230 Internal is 100 percent ISO/ECMA/ANSI compatible for 3.5" optical media, making it backward compatible with earlier 128 MB and 230 MB drives (an installed base of approximately two million drives and tens of millions of cartridges). It is also designed to comply with 640 MB and >1 GB future drive standards.

The optical cartridge (SYS.Disk(TM)) used by the SYS.230 Internal is nearly impervious to shock, temperature extremes, magnetic fields and dust. The cartridges are rewritable millions of times and have a shelf life of 30-years, longer than any tape back-up or other magnetic-based removable storage technology. Olympus SYS.Disk cartridges are protected by a lifetime warranty.

The SYS.230 Internal Mac is priced at $319, and includes the Olympus MOS330E drive mechanism, brackets and hardware to mount the drive in an open 5.25" bay of a Mac tower, such as the Power Macintosh 8000 or 9500, one SYS.Disk 230 MB cartridge (lifetime warranty), built-in SCSI termination, a 256 Kbyte cache buffer, and a two-year manufacturer's warranty from Olympus. The SYS.230 Internal Mac (model number Olympus SYS.230/INT-MAC) will be available in September.

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