Conner Peripherals, Inc. (commonly referred to as Conner), was a company that manufactured

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

s for

personal computers A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or techn ...

. Conner Peripherals was founded in 1985 by

Seagate Technology Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquart ...

co-founder and

San Jose State University San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a public university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the oldest public university on the West Coast and the founding campus of the California State University (CSU) sys ...

alumnus

Finis Conner Finis Conner (born July 28, 1943) is an American entrepreneur and pioneer of the disk drive industry, founding industry leaders Shugart Associates, Seagate Technology and Conner Peripherals. Conner Peripherals, a major HDD manufacturer, was foun ...

(1943– ). In 1986, they merged with CoData, a Colorado start-up founded by

MiniScribe MiniScribe Corporation was a manufacturer of disk storage products, founded in Longmont, Colorado in 1980. MiniScribe designed and sold stepper motor-based hard disk drives with a large amount of onboard logic for the time. They eventually moved ...

founders Terry Johnson and John Squires. CoData was developing a new type of small hard disk that put the capacity of a 5.25-inch drive into the smaller (and now commonplace) 3.5-inch format. The CoData drive was the first Conner Peripherals product. The company was partially financed by

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

, who was also a major customer for many years.

Hard disks

Design concepts

Conner's drives were notable for eschewing the "tub" type of head-disk assembly, where the disks are inside a large base casting shaped like a square

bowl A bowl is a typically round dish or container generally used for preparing, serving, or consuming food. The interior of a bowl is characteristically shaped like a spherical cap, with the edges and the bottom forming a seamless curve. This makes ...

vault Vault may refer to: * Jumping, the act of propelling oneself upwards Architecture * Vault (architecture), an arched form above an enclosed space * Bank vault, a reinforced room or compartment where valuables are stored * Burial vault (enclosure ...

with a flat lid; instead, they preferred the flat base plate approach, which was more resistant to

shock Shock may refer to: Common uses Collective noun *Shock, a historic commercial term for a group of 60, see English numerals#Special names * Stook, or shock of grain, stacked sheaves Healthcare * Shock (circulatory), circulatory medical emerge ...

and less likely to warp or deform when heated. Their first drives had the base plate carrying the disks, head arm and actuator enclosed inside a long aluminum cartridge, fixed to a bulkhead on the other side with two screws and sealed with a large, square

O-ring An O-ring, also known as a packing or a toric joint, is a mechanical gasket in the shape of a torus; it is a loop of elastomer with a round cross-section, designed to be seated in a groove and compressed during assembly between two or more par ...

. Conner's 1/3-height (1-inch thick) drives used a domed, cast aluminum lid with four screws, one on each corner, sealed to the base plate with a rubber gasket. The

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was bolted to the bottom of the base plate, with the mounting holes for the drive drilled into tabs cast into the sides of the base plate. This design would be Conner's trademark look well into the 1990s. Logically, Conner's drives had some of the characteristics of the original

drives (of which John Squires had also been a designer), with a large amount of intelligence built into the drive's

central processing unit A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

(CPU); Conner drives used a single

Motorola 68HC11 The 68HC11 (6811 or HC11 for short) is an 8-bit microcontroller (µC) family introduced by Motorola in 1984. Now produced by NXP Semiconductors, it descended from the Motorola 6800 microprocessor by way of the 6801. The 68HC11 devices are more p ...

microcontroller A microcontroller (MCU for ''microcontroller unit'', often also MC, UC, or μC) is a small computer on a single VLSI integrated circuit (IC) chip. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs (processor cores) along with memory and programmable i ...

, and ran a proprietary

real-time operating system A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. An RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which m ...

that implemented the track-following algorithms (the "servo" system) in software, as well as managing the bus interface. Running these functions in software saved a lot of hardware; in 1986, most drives used a separate

PID controller A proportional–integral–derivative controller (PID controller or three-term controller) is a control loop mechanism employing feedback that is widely used in industrial control systems and a variety of other applications requiring continuou ...

for the spindle, and used a CPU mainly to manage the bus interface and generate positioning pulses for a

stepper motor A stepper motor, also known as step motor or stepping motor, is a brushless DC electric motor that divides a full rotation into a number of equal steps. The motor's position can be commanded to move and hold at one of these steps without any pos ...

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

support added yet another CPU to interpret the SCSI commands, and track-following servos required analog components that often populated entire circuit boards of their own, thus driving up costs. Another cost-saving measure was the ability of the drive to test itself when it was initially powered on after being assembled in the factory. Unlike many competitive products, this required only a power connection, not a dedicated computer or test system. Conner Peripherals

Performance issues and the Chinook dual-actuator drive

Conner products suffered from lower performance compared to drives that had more on-board buffer memory, or those that spun the media at speeds greater than 3600 RPM, and lower capacity compared to products that utilized

zone bit recording In computer storage, zone bit recording (ZBR) is a method used by disk drives to optimise the tracks for increased data capacity. It does this by placing more sectors per zone on outer tracks than on inner tracks. This contrasts with other approach ...

(ZBR), to which Conner was slow to adapt. To remedy this, Conner produced a limited number of dual-actuator drives (internally called Chinook) for high-throughput applications. These drives used the SCSI interface and had two independently controlled (by the embedded microprocessor) servo and read/write systems, and two complete sets of read/write heads. The drive firmware enabled it to dynamically reorder commands and assign them to a specific read/write system for optimum execution time, and perform read-write-verify and read-exclusive or-write operations twice as fast as comparable single-actuator systems. Chinook was limited by its physical size — internally it used 3.5-inch disks, but the external dimensions were those of much higher-capacity 5.25-inch drives. Also,

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systems that used standard drives were dropping in price, making it simpler to use many single-actuator drives with higher capacities together rather than pay more for a smaller-capacity, dual-actuator drive. However, Conner was able to reuse parts of the design in more conventional single-actuator models, and eventually used the dual-CPU architecture to build a line of 7200-RPM drives, the ''CFP4207'' series, in 1995. In the mid-1990s, just prior to their buyout by Seagate, Conner Peripherals started using a cost-saving measure on its low-end drives. Instead of bolted-down, cast aluminum lids with rubber gaskets, Conner Peripherals came up with a design that used a thinner stamped aluminum lid, and a thick adhesive tape seal along the perimeter of the lid, where the lip of the lid meets the base casting. This design used no screws to hold on the lid — just cutting the tape could permanently damage the drive by making the lid come off. This design was kept well after the Seagate buyout, and was discontinued in 1999.

Corporate history

Conner Peripherals was founded in June 1985 and located in San Jose CA. However it did not produce any product until after it merged into and with CoData,

Boulder, Colorado Boulder is a home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Color ...

, in February 1986.Conner Peripherals Prospectus, April 12, 1988 It began shipping its first products based upon the CoData design in early 1987, initially to Compaq. During calendar 1987 Compaq represented about 90% of Conner Peripheral's sales. In 1990, Conner Peripherals set a record by reaching $1.337 billion in sales in four years, without acquisitions, making it the fastest-growing manufacturing start-up in United States history.Langan, Patricia A., ''America's Fastest Growing Company,'' Fortune, August 13, 1990 Conner Peripherals were also one of the first companies to produce IDE specification AV (audio/visual) hard drives for a low cost, such as the 420 megabyte AV in 1995-1996, and was the first to produce drives with a native (no external adapter) IEEE 1394

FireWire IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony an ...

interface. The company also started manufacturing

tape drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability. ...

s in 1993, when it purchased

Archive Corporation Archive Corporation was a computer tape drive manufacturer, based in Costa Mesa, California, that was acquired by Conner Peripherals in 1993. History The company was founded in 1980 and based out of Costa Mesa, California. The company employed 3,3 ...

. In 1996, Conner Peripherals was acquired by Seagate.

References

Bibliography

* ''International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 6''; St. James Press; 1992.

External links

Fundinguniverse.com: History of Conner Peripherals, Inc.
{{Hard disk drive manufacturers Seagate Technology 1985 establishments in California 1996 disestablishments in California 1996 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1985 American companies disestablished in 1996 Computer companies established in 1985 Computer companies disestablished in 1996 Computer storage companies Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Hard disk drives Manufacturing companies based in San Jose, California Manufacturing companies established in 1985 Manufacturing companies disestablished in 1996 Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Technology companies established in 1985 Technology companies disestablished in 1996