RITEK Corporation released a portable and super-small hard disc drive, "CompactStor", at COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2001. CompactStor is a micro storage media for the rapidly-growing IA (Information Appliance) products. RITEK has a plan to start shipping from the third quarter and hopes to ship a total of 200,000 units in 2001.

The worldwide shipment of PDAs in 2000 was 9.4 million units, double of the previous year, and is expected to reach 30 million in 2004. In addition to PDAs, the demand for portable digital IA products, such as cellular phones, digital still cameras, MP3 players, etc., is expected to exceed 700 million in the same year. Therefore, everybody agrees that the market has a great potential in the near future.

As the demand for portable IA products grows, the consumers' needs for storage media is expanding to media which has huge capacities and is easy to carry. RITEK estimates this market trend very seriously and has been consistently working on developing a new technology. As a result, RITEK succeeded in releasing a portable as well as a micro hard disc drive "CompactStor" in the first quarter of 2001.

CompactStor adopts the interface of CompactFlash (CF) Card Type II. Since it is compatible with a CF Card Type II, users can use the CompactStor with any kinds of IA products with a CF card slot that are in the market now. In addition, the price of CompactStor remains very low due to our accumulated production experiences and know-how of optical discs. RITEK hopes that the product will be a next "Star" of portable storage media in the future.

RITEK presently plans to offer two types of CompactStor; 1.1GB and 2.0GB of recording capacity, respectively. We also have a plan to expand its capacity up to 6GB.

Specification: CF Type II (Compatible with ATA and PCMCIA)
Capacity: 1.1 GB/550MB
Average Seek Time: 11 ms
Data Transfer Rate: 6MB/sec.
Shock: 175g @2ms 1/2 since wave (operating), 1,500g @1ms 1/2 since wave (non-operating)
Vibration: 2G 0-peak (5~500 Hz)