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Wikipedia / SyQuest Technology

SyQuest Technology, Inc. was an early entrant into the hard disk drive market for personal computers. Its earliest products were the SQ306R, a 5MB 3.9" (100mm) cartridge disk drive and associated Q-Pak cartridge for IBM XT compatibles. Subsequently a non-removable medium version was announced, the SQ306F.

For many years, SyQuest was the most popular means of transferring large desktop publishing documents, such as advertisements, to professional printerss. SyQuest marketed its products as able to give personal computer users "endless" hard drive space for data-intensive applications like desktop publishing, Internet information management, pre-press, multimedia, audio, video, digital photography, fast backup, data exchange and archiving, along with confidential data security and easy portability for the road.

The introduction of lower-cost options that offered similar capacity, like the Zip drive and later the CD-R, the latter of which was much less expensive once it reached mass market, seriously eroded SyQuest's sales, and the company went bankrupt in 1998. Sales of its existing inventory continued until 2003.

History

The company was founded on January 27, 1982 by Syed Iftikar who had been a founder of Seagate, along with Ben Alaimo, Bill Krajewski, Anil Nigam and George Toldi.

The company was named partially after the founder, Syed Iftikar, because of a company meeting wherein it was decided that "SyQuest" ought to be a shortened name for "Sy's Quest".

The company announced its first product family of 3.9" (100mm) cartridge disk drives and associated Q-Pak cartridges at the 1982 National Computer Conference, surprising observers with the low price of $750 for the drive and $35 for a cartridge. They achieved limited success in government markets where removable media were required for security purposes.

In 1986, SyQuest announced the SQ555 and its SQ400 associated cartridge, a 44MB 5¼-inch removable cartridge hard disk drive, using the industry standard 130mm disk as its medium. Double capacity versions, the SQ5110 and SQ800 were introduced in 1991. This generation of products became the de facto standard in the Apple Macintosh world to store, transfer, and backup large amounts of data such as generated by graphic artists, musicians, and engineers.

SyQuest went public on the NASDAQ in 1991.

Bankruptcy

In early 1996, the company cut 60% of its workforce; later that year, company namesake Syed Iftikar was fired "in a management shakeup."

After 1997, SyQuest did not fare well in the market. Their core desktop publishing customers began increasingly to use CD-R media and FTP to transfer files, while Iomega's Zip drives dominated the small office/home office market. Over the period 1995 to 1997, sales declined, resulting in a series of losses. In the first quarter of 1997, those losses had been reduced to $6.8 million with net revenues increasing to $48.3 million. This compares to a net loss of $33.8 million, or $2.98 per share, on net revenues of $78.7 million for the same period the year before.

They company laid off half of its staff in August 1998 before filing for bankruptcy by the end of the year. Portions of the company were purchased by Iomega Corp. in January 1999, with SyQuest retaining the right to sell its remaining inventory on condition of renaming themselves SYQT. Although the company's original syquest.com website continued to provide technical support for its original products until 2003, its rebranded syqt.com website became a digital disk drive and media retailer. By 2009, that website ceased to exist, with its domain (www.syqt.com) put up for sale in the Chinese market.

Products

Syquest's product line included such devices as the following:

Fixed Media Drives (unformatted capacity):

  • SQ306F fixed-disk hard drive. 6.38MB. 5.0MBit/s. 3m/s track-to-track. 3,547rpm. 12,000bpi. 306cyl, 2heads, 1disc.

  • SQ312F fixed-disk hard drive. 12.75MB.

  • SQ325F fixed-disk hard drive. 25.5MB using MFM encoding. Specs: 612 cylinders, 4 heads, no WPC, no RWC, fastest step rate.

  • SQ338F fixed-disk hard drive. 38.2MB. Supports MFM or RLL encoding. Specs: 615 cylinders, 6 heads, no WPC, no RWC, fastest step rate.

Removable Media Drives (formatted capacity):

  • SQ306RD drive/SQ100 disk. 5MB using MFM encoding.

  • SQ312RD drive/SQ200 disk (SyQuest used the SQ200 model number again for a desktop drive in 1994). 10MB using MFM encoding.

  • SQ319RD drive/SQ300 disk. 15MB using RLL encoding (10MB using MFM encoding).

  • SQ2542 drive/disk – 42MB 2.5" The Iota series.

  • SQ555 drive/SQ400 disk – 44MB 5.25". Internal SCSI. Also used in the Atari Megafile 44 (Review in Atari Start Magazine March 1990) and sold as part of the E-mu Systems RM45 – Removable Media Storage System.

  • SQ5110 drive/SQ800 disk – 88MB 5.25". Internal SCSI. Compatible with SQ400 disk.

  • SQ5200C drive/SQ2000 disk – 200MB 5.25" internal SCSI. The external desktop version of the SQ5200C was named SQ200, not to be confused with the earlier model SQ200 10MB disks. Compatible with SQ400 and SQ800 disks.

  • SQ3105 drive/SQ310 disk – 105MB.

  • SQ3270 drive/SQ327 disk – 270MB. Compatible with SQ310 disk.

  • EZ135 aka EZDrive 135/EZ135 disk – 135MB 3.5" removable-disk hard drive. Competitor to Iomega's Zip drive. This was available in SCSI, IDE and parallel port versions.

  • EZFlyer aka EZFlyer 230 drive/EZ230 disk – 230MB 3.5" removable-disk hard drive. EZ135 compatible. Positioned as an upgrade to the EZ135.

  • SyJet drive/SQ1500 disk – 1.5GB removable-disk hard drive. Competitor to Iomega's Jaz drive).

  • SparQ drive/SparQ disk – 1.0GB 3.5" removable-disk hard drive. Lower cost per MB than the SyJet.

  • Quest drive/Quest disc – a 4.7GB removable-disk hard drive. PC Magazine definition. Available for a short time in 1998.

The 5.25" removable-disk hard drives with 44MB, 88MB, and 200MB capacities were mostly used on Macintosh systems via the SCSI interface.

See also

References