The X-10 Fastcache Floppy Drive was a 1996

floppy disk drive A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

that read 3.5-inch floppies at ten times the speed of a standard floppy drive.

Invention

The drive was invented by Martin Bodo, Bob Rosenbloom, Ken Wong, Alan Lorenz and Igor Lokhmotov. Bodo said that "Slow floppies always bugged me. I saw that all the parts of a PC were getting exponentially faster, but not the floppy disk. That was the inspiration for the X-10 project." It could read an entire floppy disk in about five seconds. The X-10 drive ran at 4x spindle speed and could write or read to both sides of the floppy simultaneously. Whenever the user inserted a disk, the drive would immediately read the entire floppy into its own custom

Intel 80188 Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components such as central processing u ...

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

-based proprietary controller card

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

. The drive used motorized ejection so it could sequence and

cache Cache, caching, or caché may refer to: Science and technology * Cache (computing), a technique used in computer storage for easier data access * Cache (biology) or hoarding, a food storing behavior of animals * Cache (archaeology), artifacts p ...

writes. The drive was optimized so it could step fast enough to avoid missing tracks improving over the normal slow

seek time Higher performance in hard disk drives comes from devices which have better performance characteristics. These performance characteristics can be grouped into two categories: #Access time, access time and #Data transfer rate, data transfer time (o ...

s on a standard floppy drive.

Commercialization

The X10 Fastcache Floppy was offered for sale by Corporate Systems Center (CSC). It was priced, in 1996, at retail and OEM when standard floppy drives retailed at . About 1,000 X-10 units were ever made.

References

* * *

External links

* Newsgroup with copied X-10 writeup: {{cite newsgroup, message-id=3299390a.528655@news.mindspring.com, newsgroup=misc.forsale.computers.discussion, date=24 Nov 1996, access-date=2012-06-12, title=Re: WTB: High speed Floppy, url=https://groups.google.com/group/misc.forsale.computers.discussion/msg/bcf462ff477ef0c1?dmode=source&output=gplain&noredirect
Martin Bodo bio

Sr. Engineer Igor Lokhmotov resume
Floppy disk drives Legacy hardware