|
|
The logos can be opened with Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, CorelDraw or Adobe Photoshop. All the logos are also available in format EPS.
if you don't have them .. you can get them
here!
.............................. Quantum Data Storage Solutions
Logo and Trademark..............................
Quantum Corporation is a manufacturer of tape drive products, based in San Jose, California. From its founding in 1980 until 2000, it was also a major disk storage manufacturer (usually #2 in market share behind Seagate), and was based in Milpitas, California. Quantum got its start when executives and designers from Shugart Associates, IBM and Memorex came up with an idea for an 8-inch hard drive that would achieve decent performance without the cost or complexity of using a full closed-loop servo system — a difficult task before the advent of dedicated servo ICs and readily-available DSPs.
Because of the demand for its drives, Quantum decided early on to outsource its manufacturing, unlike most of its competitors, who decided to stay completely vertically integrated and had opened plants of their own in Singapore, Ireland, Malaysia and Hong Kong. In 1984, Quantum signed an agreement with Matsushita to produce its mass-market drives and the HardCard in the Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics (MKE) factory in Ipponmatsu, Japan. By the late 1990s, all of Quantum's disk products would be produced in Matsushita factories.
Quantum's first products were very popular; according to one of the company's historical documents, by 1982 it had a 25% share of the market. It designed smaller ST-506-compatible versions of its hard drives, the Q500 series, using the same servo system. It also introduced (through its Plus Development division) what would be most people's introduction to the company, the Plus HardCard, in 1985. The HardCard was essentially a smaller version of the Q500, designed to fit in an ISA slot, with an embedded controller card bolted to the same frame as the drive. The product sold very well, and inspired several other companies to put hard drives on an ISA-format card; this was not as desirable as the Quantum solution at first, since most 3.5-inch drives in the late 1980s were half-height (1.6 inch/40.6 mm) models and thus could not fit in a single ISA slot. The HardCard was originally introduced in a 10 MB and 20 MB model, with a 40 MB model introduced in 1987; the line ended with the 52 and 105 MB HardCard II XL models (based on the ProDrive LPS 52/105) in 1990.
Not long after this, Quantum decided it would enter the then brand-new SCSI market. The first drive it designed especially for SCSI was the Q280 80MB drive, which was released in 1986 and had an average seek time of 30 milliseconds — quite good for the era. The Q280 was also one of the first mass-market drives (along with Conner Peripherals' products) to use embedded servo. Later on, Quantum combined the Q280's embedded controller design with the servo hardware from the Q500 series, and developed the ProDrive range, which was also its first drive family to support the ATA interface. The two design platforms (optical assist and full embedded servo) co-existed until the early 1990s; by then, areal density was high enough to make the gratings impractical, and advancements in embedded servo technology had made the technology economical enough to use in low-end drives.
When the company was started, low end drives generally used stepper motors, just like floppy disk drives did. Steppers worked, but were slow, noisy, and prone to reliability problems due to changes in temperature. The idea the founders had was to combine the predefined steps of a stepper motor, and the accuracy of a closed-loop servo. Their solution was to use an optical positioning system to guide the actuator arm in "gross motor" movements and to only use the closed-loop servo for precisely aligning the heads to a specific track.
Quantum referred to this part in their documentation as a "glass scale", and it was attached to the actuator arm. The scale was a small, light, very thin piece of glass whose surface had an array of narrow chromium plated lines separated by equal widths of clear glass. The pitch of the lines matched the track pitch on the disk. Immediately below the scale was a glass reticle, under which was a matching quad photo detector array. The reticle had four openings, one above each cell of the photo array, and each opening was plated with a pattern of lines that matched those on the scale. The phase relationship between the lines in each of the four windows (relative to the scale) was 0°, 90º, 180º and 270º. This allowed for quadrature detection of exact track position and direction of head movement. This optical system was illuminated by an overhead IR LED that sent light through the scale and the reticle into the quad photo detector. During a seek, the system merely needed to count the number of track crossings seen by the detector array to know when it was approaching the desired track.
This saved quite a bit of hardware as it only required a single 8-bit microcontroller to handle the entire servo system. The 40 MB Q2000 and 80 MB Q4000 were the first drives to use this technology. Later on, as track pitch narrowed, diffraction become a problem, and the decision was made to discontinue the system in favor of fully magnetic embedded servo. The last drives to use the optical assist system were the ProDrive LPS 120 and 240 "Gemini" models, released in 1991.
External links
|
|
