Chatsworth, California
Chatsworth is a suburban neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles, California, in the San Fernando Valley.
The area was home to Native Americans, some of whom left caves containing rock art. Chatsworth was explored and colonized by the Spanish b ...
manufacturer of
hard disk drive
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 platters coated with magne ...
s during the early 1980s. CMI made basic
stepper motor
A stepper motor, also known as step motor or stepping motor, is a brushless DC electric motor that divides a full rotation into a number of equal steps. The motor's position can be commanded to move and hold at one of these steps without any posi ...
-based drives, with low cost in mind.
History
The company was founded in 1979 by Abraham Brand. In August 1984 they secured a major contract as sole producer of 20- megabyte hard drives for the base model of the
IBM PC/AT
The IBM Personal Computer/AT (model 5170, abbreviated as IBM AT or PC/AT) was released in 1984 as the fourth model in the IBM Personal Computer line, following the IBM PC/XT and its IBM Portable PC variant. It was designed around the Intel 80 ...
. Unfortunately, the Singapore-manufactured CM6000 drives proved highly unreliable. Dealers reported failure rates as high as 25 to 30 percent. Part of the problem was high demand for the PC/AT; IBM increased its order from 90,000 units in 1984 to 240,000 in 1985, and manufacturing quality suffered. Second, the design of the disk drive subsystem itself was flawed.
At the same time,
Quantum Corporation
Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides technology to store, manage, archive, and protect video and unstructured data throughout the data lifecycle. Their products are used by enterprises, media and ...
sued CMI for
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
infringement relating to the
servo
Servo may refer to:
Mechanisms
* Servomechanism, or servo, a device used to provide control of a desired operation through the use of feedback
** AI servo, an autofocus mode
** Electrohydraulic servo valve, an electrically operated valve that c ...
mechanism in the entire CM6600 line of drives. Instead of putting the tracking grating on the head arm and driving the arm directly from a
voice coil
A voice coil (consisting of a former, collar, and winding) is the coil of wire attached to the apex of a loudspeaker cone. It provides the motive force to the cone by the reaction of a magnetic field to the current passing through it. The te ...
, like the Quantum designs, CMI made a composite motor that would bolt to the drive in place of the usual stepper motor, with the voice coil on the bottom and the tracking mechanism on top (similar to DC servo motors used in process controls and robotics). CMI connected the motor to the arm with a metal-band pulley, the same mechanism they used on their stepper-motor drives. Since the feedback system was behind the pulley, it had to compensate for slack in the arm, one of several things the CMI firmware didn't take account of.
In late 1985 IBM announced that it would no longer use CMI drives after its contract expired at the end of the year. CMI released a "patent-free" 7600 series of drives in 1986, but never recovered from the IBM incident. On July 2, 1986, they announced their departure from hard disk production and marketing—95% of their business. Attempts were made in 1987 to sell the remainder of the company to movie producer
Hemdale Film Corporation
Hemdale Film Corporation, known as Hemdale Communications after 1992, was an independent American-British film production company and distributor. The company was founded in London in 1967 as the Hemdale Company by actor David Hemmings and John D ...
and to animated television program producer DIC Animation City; however, both deals fell through.
In 1988 the shell corporation, still traded publicly, was acquired by Paul and Natalie Koether of
Far Hills, New Jersey
Far Hills is a borough in Somerset County in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2010 United States census, the population was 919,kava and other botanical products. Finally, on June 6, 2005, it was acquired by Naturex, S.A., a French competitor.