Priam Corporation was a company located in San Jose, California, founded in 1978 by William Schroeder and Al Wilson, two former Memorex executives, as a manufacturer of hard disk drives. Originally, they made high-capacity 14-inch drives, developed for

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

s, available for

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

s and high-end workstations, but switched to 8-inch disk drives in 1980. Their 8-inch hard disks could be found in a wide variety of add-on products like the huge Mator Shark box with IEEE-488 interface for Commodore PET/CBM computers or the Priam DataTower series, external storage solutions, combining high-capacity hard disks and

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s in a single case, which could interface to various computers including

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...

s. While Priam was considered a leader in certain technology segments at one time, they were late catching up in the transition to the 5.25-inch form factor and were ultimately one of the many hard drive manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s that went out of business, merged, or closed their hard drive divisions; as a result of capacities and demand for products increased, and profits became hard to find. In 1985, Priam dropped their own 5.25-inch drive in-house development and merged with Vertex Peripherals, a company competing in the market for 5.25-inch drives. In the mid-1980s Priam's InnerSpace series offered fully integrated disk drive solutions to overcome disk capacity limitations imposed by MS-DOS prior to the release of version 3.31/4.0. This included custom hard disk controllers (based on Western Digital designs) as well as dedicated software for formatting (PFMT.EXE) and partitioning (EDISK.EXE). PFMT.EXE placed a driver EVDR.SYS into the root directory of the boot volume. This was used by DOS to retrieve drive and partitioning information located in the last 12 KB of the disk. Priam's EDISK also used dedicated

MBR MBR may refer to: Computing * Master boot record, the first sector of a partitioned data storage device, used for booting * Memory buffer register * Minimum bounding rectangle * Minimum bit rate Publications * ''The Malaysia Book of Records'' * ...

partition ID The partition type (or partition ID) in a partition's entry in the partition table inside a master boot record (MBR) is a byte value intended to specify the file system the partition contains or to flag special access methods used to access th ...

s 0x45 and 0x5C. Solutions were offered for DOS,

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, Unix and Pick. Priam opened a manufacturing facility in Taiwan in 1987 to move the production of 5.25-inch drives there. After having suffered losses since 1985, the company declared bankruptcy in 1989. It was re-established with the help of external investors as Priam Systems Corp. in 1990, led by Wil Cochran as president and Dick Reiser, a founder of Priam, as vice president. Finally, the disk drive business was sold to Prima International of Santa Clara, California, a computer peripherals

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, in 1991. Service was provided by Sequel.

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* (NB. An (incomplete) list of hard disk drives produced by Priam.) {{Hard disk drive manufacturers 1978 establishments in California 1991 disestablishments in California 1991 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1978 American companies disestablished in 1991 Computer companies established in 1978 Computer companies disestablished in 1991 Computer storage companies Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Manufacturing companies based in San Jose, California

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