The company was the first to produce hard drives employing glass as the substrate for their platters, allowing for significantly higher data densities and greater shock resistance.

[4] Swartz had previously co-founded Maxtor Corporation, one of the largest hard drive manufacturers in the world, in 1982, before leaving them in mid-1987 amid an executive shakeup at the company.

[12][6] The use of glass allows for much higher data densities and greater shock resistance than those of disks using aluminum as the substrate, which was the industry standard at the time.

[14] Areal was additionally the first company to build major internal components of their drives using polycarbonate plastic in order to save weight, as their targeted clientele were portable makers.

[15] In December 1988, Areal received a multi-million-dollar capital injection from Nippon Sheet Glass (NSG) and Tokyo Boeki.

[17] Between the end of 1988 and the middle of 1990, Areal had received roughly $7.5 million in funding from their Japanese investors, which now also included Toyo Menka Kaisha and Tomen Electronics.

[18] Despite the capital investment and multiple hiring rounds at the company's Point Arena plant, Areal's 3.5-inch hard drive products were met with multiple delays owing to recurring bugs in the designs of the drives' logic board; and difficulty in bringing the cost of manufacturing down by reducing the number of assembly steps.

It was introduced in late November 1990 in evaluation quantities, these samples manufactured by Areal's employees in Point Area.

[26] Sanyo began producing the MD-2060 in volume quantities in February 1991, after Areal had received their first large contract from Disk Technologies Corporation of Florida worth $4 million in December 1990.

[32] Areal branched out from the OEM market in May 1992 and began selling to customers directly with the E-Series of external drives.

[35] In January 1993, Tomen and Sanyo acquired a majority stake in Areal for $3 million, effectively buying out the company and placing it under Japanese control.