AustStor offers to swap new optical drives for old

Purchasers of the new Cheetah 2.6GB optical drives from AustStor are being offered a 'buy-back' deal on their old models.

"We will purchase your existing 650MB drives for $450 and 1.3GB models for $850," said managing director, Lachlan MacDonald. "And we are happy to extend this offer to any other manufacturers' products."

Manufactured by Plasmon, each 2.6GB Cheetah disk holds the equivalent of over a million-and-a-half pages of text and is fully backward compatible with earlier 1.3GB and 650MB magneto-optic disks.

The drives are available in internal or externally mounted configurations.

Cheetah drives ship as a complete solution with software for Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows NT and Macintosh platforms. Once software is installed, the drive is as easy-to-use as a magnetic hard disk, but without any worry of potential head crashes or shortage of capacity.

With a recommended price of $3486 (inc. tax) for the external model and $3154 for the internal, the 2.6GB drives deliver twice the previous available capacity, but at less than half the cost per gigabyte.