X10 accelerated floppy drive
Encyclopedia
| "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." |
| Martin Bodo, X-10 designer |
The X-10 Fastcache Floppy Drive was a floppy disk drive that read 3.5" floppies at ten times the speed of a standard floppy drive. 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 CPU-based proprietary controller card RAM
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
. The drive used motorized ejection so it could sequence and cache
Cache
In computer engineering, a cache is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data that is stored within a cache might be values that have been computed earlier or duplicates of original values that are stored elsewhere...
writes. The drive was optimized so it could step fast enough to avoid missing tracks improving over the normal slow seek times on a standard floppy drive. The X10 Fastcache Floppy was offered for sale by Corporate Systems Center (CSC). It was priced, in 1996, at retail and OEM
OEM
OEM means the original manufacturer of a component for a product, which may be resold by another company.OEM may also refer to:-Computing:* OEM font, or OEM-US, the original character set of the IBM PC, circa 1981...
when standard floppy drives retailed at . About 1,000 X-10 units were ever made.