FWB Ships hammerCD 6x Reader and New DDS Tape Drives

New Drives Offer Best Available CD-ROM and Tape Backup Performance

Menlo Park. May 8. 1995. FWB, Inc., manufacturer of the award winning
Hammer brand of mass storage products, today shipped the hammerCD 6x
Reader, hammerDAT 2000 and hammerDAT 4000 for Macintosh and Power
Macintosh Systems. All three drives are replacements for drives already in
the FWB product line and provide enhanced performance characteristics.
These drives will also be compatible with Apple's upcoming Power Macintosh
with PCI systems.

The hammerCD 6x Reader

The hammerCD 6x Reader is a half-height CD-ROM drive capable of sustained
transfer rates up to 900KB/sec. This represents the fastest available data
transfer rate of any mass-production CD-ROM drive. The excellent
throughput is complemented by an impressive 145ms access time. "The
hammerCD 6x provides profoundly improved performance for heavy users of
CD-ROM discs. This will be especially beneficial in networked applications
or any use on a single workstation which involves frequent searches or
large file transfers, " said Fred Swan, senior product marketing manager
at FWB.

Ideally suited for demanding graphics, pre-press and database applications,
the hammerCD 6x also has special features which make it an excellent
solution for audio use. The drive's front panel includes a play/skip/scan
button for convenient playback of audio CDs. Audio output is available
through the front-panel headphone jack and rear-panel RCA jacks.

The drive is bundled with CD-ROM Toolkit 1.5.2 which is optimized for SCSI
Manager 4.3, System 7.5 compliant and Power Macintosh native. The drive
and software work together to provide digital audio extraction over the
SCSI bus at 6x. When used on AV Macintosh computers, the system can be
configured to run as a fully-functional Karaoke machine. This new version
of CD-ROM Toolkit also offers additional new functionality, including: the
mounting of CD-Plus and Active Audio format discs, special support to
improve the mounting and usability of poorly-mastered CD-Recordable discs,
the ability to mount discs with 1024 or 2048 byte partition map blocks,
and enhanced digital audio extraction on Power Macintosh computers.

Also included with the hammerCD 6x solutions are all necessary power and
SCSI cables, one CD-ROM caddy, external active termination and complete
documentation. Based on the Plextor PX63-CH mechanism, which is rated for
a 100,000 POH MTBF, The hammerCD 6x subsystem carries FWB's two-year
PremiumService warranty. The hammerCD 6x retails for $849 and replaces the
hammerCD 4x drive.

The hammerDAT 2000 and hammerDAT 4000

The new hammerDAT 2000 and hammerDAT 4000 complement FWB's full line of DDS
and DDS-2 tape backup solutions. The hammerDAT 2000, based on the
Hewlett-Packard 35470A DDS-l drive provides 2GB of data storage capacity
on a 90-meter tape. The drive provides a 183 KB/sec. transfer rate. The
drive is targeted to supply affordable and reliable backup and archiving
for single computers and small networks. It is also backward compatible
with 60-meter, 1.3GB DDS tape cartridges.

The hammerDAT 4000 provides an average of 4GB of data storage on a 90-meter
tape by using on-drive DDS-standard hardware compression. Data transfer
performance reaches 732 KB/sec. with optimal compression. Like the
hammerDAT 2000, the native capacity is 2GB and the drive is backward
compatible with 60-meter tapes. The hammerDAT 4000 is targeted at advanced
single workstations and small network environments.

Both drives feature 50,000 POH MTBF ratings, 30 second average seek time
and are bundled with Dantz Development's Retrospect Remote backup and
archiving software. The drives are available as external units only and
each solution includes all necessary cables, external active termination,
one 90-meter tape and full documentation. This superior hammerDAT 2000,
priced at $1,509 MSRP, replaces FWB's previous hammerDAT 2000 effective
immediately. The hammerDAT 4000 replaces the hammerDAT 5000, but offers
the same actual capacity and retains the $1,639 retail price.

The hammerDAT 2000 and hammerDAT 4000 are part of FWB's popular,
high-performance HammerDAT family of products which also include the
hammerDAT 8000 DDS-2 drive (MSRP $1,699) and the hammerDAT 48G Autoloader
which provides unattended backup of up to 48 gigabytes or more on a single
workstation or over a network. The hammerDAT 48G Autoloader, which retails
for $4,099, is also based on DDS-2 technology.

Since 1984, FWB, Inc. has been developing mass storage and backup products
specifically for the Macintosh platform, including the Apple PowerBook,
the Apple Workgroup Servers and the Power Macintosh. FWB products include
SledgeHammer RAID Arrays; Hammer, Hammer-PE, PocketHammer and HammerPB
hard drives; HammerDisk optical and removable drives; HammerTape and
HammerDAT tape backup systems; and the Fast and Wide SCSI-2 JackHammer
accelerator boards for PCI and NuBus. FWB also publishes RAID ToolKit,
Hard Disk ToolKit, Hard Disk ToolKit Personal Edition disk management
software, and CD-ROM ToolKit accelerator software for CDROM drives. FWB's
products have been consistently rated the best in their class by
publications such as MacWEEK, MacUser, Macworld, AV Video Magazine, PC
Magazine, and BYTE. FWB's PremiumService has won the "Best Technical
Support" award from The Macintosh Consultants Network. Inc. Magazine
ranked FWB on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing privately held
companies in both 1993 and 1994.

FWB Inc
1555 Adams Dr
Menlo Park, CA 94025
415-325-4FWB,  fax 415-833-4657
AOL: FWBINC
AppleLink: FWB
CIS: 71320,1034
eWORLD: FWB.INC

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