Micropolis (company)
Micropolis Corporation was a disk drive company located in Chatsworth, California and founded in 1976. Micropolis initially manufactured high capacity (for the time) hard sectored 5.25 inch floppy drives and controllers. Later manufacturing hard drives using SCSI and ESDI interfaces.
Micropolis's first advance was to take the existing 48 TPI (tracks per inch) standard created by Shugart Associates, and double both the track density and track recording density to get 4 times the total storage on a 5.25 inch floppy. Micropolis used 100 TPI density because of the attraction of an exact 100 tracks to the inch, but later switched to 96 TPI when Shugart also went to the 96 TPI standard, based on exact doubling of the 48 TPI standard. This allowed for backwards compatibility for reading by double stepping to read 48 TPI discs.
Micropolis entered the hard disk business with an 8" hard drive, following Seagate's lead (Seagate was the next company Allan Shugart founded after Shugart Associates was sold). They later followed with a 5" hard drive.
This company was 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. While Micropolis was able to hold on longer than many of the others, it ultimately sold its hard drive business to Singapore Technologies (a subsidiary of Temasek Holdings), who has ceased to market the brand.
After the disk business sale, Micropolis was reorganized as StreamLogic Corporation, which declared bankruptcy in 1997 amid securities fraud allegations. StreamLogic's RAIDION line of storage subsystems survive, now marketed by the RAIDION Systems division of Peripheral Technology Group. Its VIDEON video on demand technology was sold to Sumitomo Corporation.
Emerging from the StreamLogic reorganization was yet another company named Hammer Storage Solutions, which was formed from the purchase of the hardware division of FWB, a small Macintosh storage vendor. Its assets were sold in 2000 to Bell Microproducts.
External links
- DigiSAFE
- RAIDION Systems (Now defunct)
- Hammer Storage division of Bell Microproducts
- Marcus Bennett's incomplete Micropolis Documentation resource