Conner Peripherals
Encyclopedia
Conner Peripherals was a company that manufactured hard drives for personal computers. Conner Peripherals was founded in 1985 by Seagate Technology
co-founder Finis Conner but it in itself never produced a product. In 1986 Conner Peripherals merged with CoData, started by MiniScribe
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 much smaller (and now commonplace) 3.5-inch format. The CoData drive was the first Conner Peripherals product. The company was financed by Compaq
, who was also a major customer for many years.
or vault
with a flat lid; instead, they preferred the flat base plate approach, which was more resistant to shock
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
. 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 printed circuit board
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 MiniScribe drives (of which John Squires had also been a designer), with a large amount of intelligence built into the drive's central processing unit
(CPU); Conner drives used a single Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller
, and ran a proprietary real-time operating system
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
for the spindle, and used a CPU mainly to manage the bus interface and generate positioning pulses for a stepper motor
. SCSI 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.
(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 re-order 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, RAID
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 re-use 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.
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) 1394 Firewire interface.
The company started manufacturing tape drives in 1993, when it purchased Archive Corporation.
In 1996 Conner Peripherals merged with Seagate
.
Finis Conner, the company founder, went on to form two other companies, Conner Technology Corporation, a manufacturer of low cost 3.5-inch hard disk drives assembled in India, and StorCard (2001), a company dedicating to developing a new standard in high capacity smart card
s. Conner Technology's goal was to be a high volume, low cost supplier of mainstream hard disk drives to leading personal computer suppliers. Unfortunately, the company could never deliver the low prices required for personal computer suppliers to switch, and the company shut down its operations in 1998. StorCard offers an encrypted, low-cost removable card using semiconductor memory in a credit card size format, along with a compatible receiver mechanism.
Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives. Incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology, Seagate is currently incorporated in Dublin, Ireland and has its principal executive offices in Scotts Valley, California, United States.-1970s:On November 1, 1979...
co-founder Finis Conner but it in itself never produced a product. In 1986 Conner Peripherals merged with CoData, started by MiniScribe
MiniScribe
MiniScribe 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 intelligence for the time. They eventually moved into higher-profile voice coil motor designs, at which...
founders Terry Johnson and John Squires. CoData was developing a new type of small hard disk
Hard disk
A hard disk drive is a non-volatile, random access digital magnetic data storage device. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the...
that put the capacity of a 5.25-inch drive into the much smaller (and now commonplace) 3.5-inch format. The CoData drive was the first Conner Peripherals product. The company was financed by Compaq
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation is a personal computer company founded in 1982. Once the largest supplier of personal computing systems in the world, Compaq existed as an independent corporation until 2002, when it was acquired for US$25 billion by Hewlett-Packard....
, who was also a major customer for many years.
Basic 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 bowlBowl (vessel)
A bowl is a common open-top container used in many cultures to serve food, and is also used for drinking and storing other items. They are typically small and shallow, although some, such as punch bowls and salad bowls, are larger and often intended to serve many people.Bowls have existed for...
or vault
Vault (architecture)
A Vault is an architectural term for an arched form used to provide a space with a ceiling or roof. The parts of a vault exert lateral thrust that require a counter resistance. When vaults are built underground, the ground gives all the resistance required...
with a flat lid; instead, they preferred the flat base plate approach, which was more resistant to shock
Shock (mechanics)
A mechanical or physical shock is a sudden acceleration or deceleration caused, for example, by impact, drop, kick, earthquake, or explosion. Shock is a transient physical excitation....
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
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 disc-shaped cross-section, designed to be seated in a groove and compressed during assembly between two or more parts, creating a seal at the interface.The O-ring...
. 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 printed circuit board
Printed circuit board
A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...
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 MiniScribe drives (of which John Squires had also been a designer), with a large amount of intelligence built into the drive's central processing unit
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
(CPU); Conner drives used a single Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller
Microcontroller
A microcontroller is a small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip, as well as a typically small amount of RAM...
, and ran a proprietary real-time operating system
Real-time operating system
A real-time operating system is an operating system intended to serve real-time application requests.A key characteristic of a RTOS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept and complete an application's task; the variability is jitter...
that implemented the track following algorithms (the "servo"
Servomechanism
thumb|right|200px|Industrial servomotorThe grey/green cylinder is the [[Brush |brush-type]] [[DC motor]]. The black section at the bottom contains the [[Epicyclic gearing|planetary]] [[Reduction drive|reduction gear]], and the black object on top of the motor is the optical [[rotary encoder]] for...
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
PID controller
A proportional–integral–derivative controller is a generic control loop feedback mechanism widely used in industrial control systems – a PID is the most commonly used feedback controller. A PID controller calculates an "error" value as the difference between a measured process variable and a...
for the spindle, and used a CPU mainly to manage the bus interface and generate positioning pulses for a stepper motor
Stepper motor
A stepper motor is a brushless, electric motor that can divide a full rotation into a large number of steps. The motor's position can be controlled precisely without any feedback mechanism , as long as the motor is carefully sized to the application...
. SCSI 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.
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 recordingZone bit recording
Zone Bit Recording is used by disk drives to store more sectors per track on outer tracks than on inner tracks. It is also called Zone Constant Angular Velocity ....
(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 re-order 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, RAID
RAID
RAID is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit...
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 re-use 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
Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives. Incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology, Seagate is currently incorporated in Dublin, Ireland and has its principal executive offices in Scotts Valley, California, United States.-1970s:On November 1, 1979...
, 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
Adhesive tape
Adhesive tape is one of many varieties of backing materials coated with an adhesive. Several types of adhesives can be used.-Types:Pressure sensitive 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
Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives. Incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology, Seagate is currently incorporated in Dublin, Ireland and has its principal executive offices in Scotts Valley, California, United States.-1970s:On November 1, 1979...
buyout, and was discontinued in 1999.
Corporate history
In 1990 Conner 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.Conner Peripherals were also one of the first companies to produce IDE
AT Attachment
Parallel ATA , originally ATA, is an interface standard for the connection of storage devices such as hard disks, solid-state drives, floppy drives, and optical disc drives in computers. The standard is maintained by X3/INCITS committee...
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) 1394 Firewire interface.
The company started manufacturing tape drives in 1993, when it purchased Archive Corporation.
In 1996 Conner Peripherals merged with Seagate
Seagate Technology
Seagate Technology is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives. Incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology, Seagate is currently incorporated in Dublin, Ireland and has its principal executive offices in Scotts Valley, California, United States.-1970s:On November 1, 1979...
.
Finis Conner, the company founder, went on to form two other companies, Conner Technology Corporation, a manufacturer of low cost 3.5-inch hard disk drives assembled in India, and StorCard (2001), a company dedicating to developing a new standard in high capacity smart card
Smart card
A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card , is any pocket-sized card with embedded integrated circuits. A smart card or microprocessor cards contain volatile memory and microprocessor components. The card is made of plastic, generally polyvinyl chloride, but sometimes acrylonitrile...
s. Conner Technology's goal was to be a high volume, low cost supplier of mainstream hard disk drives to leading personal computer suppliers. Unfortunately, the company could never deliver the low prices required for personal computer suppliers to switch, and the company shut down its operations in 1998. StorCard offers an encrypted, low-cost removable card using semiconductor memory in a credit card size format, along with a compatible receiver mechanism.
Further reading
- Pollack, Andrew. A Novel Idea: Customer Satisfaction, The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, 27 May 1990, page F1.