Wren was the major

brand name A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's goods or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create and ...

for a series of 5.25-inch

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

s produced by

Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the N ...

(CDC) for the

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (P ...

market during the 1980s. The brand evolved through seven major versions, I through VII, using custom attachments but later adapting

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

and IDE. Other brands included the Elite 5.25-inch 5,400 RPM drives, the Swift 3.5-inch series and the relatively rare Sabre 8-inch drives. The Wren II was the first drive to use the ATA-IDE interface, and the first to use the 40-pin ATA connector, introduced on

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...

386 systems at COMDEX in 1986. Wren was a major brand during the 1980s, especially in the high-end market where its 5,400 RPM voice-coil–based technology gave them a performance edge. However, by the 1980s, CDC was in the middle of selling itself off leading to its eventual disappearance. The drive division was spun off as Imprimis in 1986.

Seagate Technology Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American Computer data storage, data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with ...

, who had been lagging Wren and Elite in the high-performance market, purchased Imprimis and rebranded the entire line as Seagate in 1989.

References

External links

CDC Hard Disk Drives
Hard disk computer storage Control Data Corporation hardware {{compu-storage-stub