Dear Santa....
By Reuters
November 9, 1997, 8:40 p.m. PT
IBM (IBM) plans to announce a breakthrough in
disk-drive
technology that the company said will pave the way
to far-better
personal computer storage devices than exist
today.
The development, which IBM plans to unveil
officially
tomorrow, represents a major step forward for disk
drives, said
Bob Scranton, vice president of technology for
IBM's Storage
Systems division.
Scranton said most disk-drive improvements involve
the
shrinking of the area needed to store individual
bits of
information. But as those areas become smaller, he
said, more
sensitive devices are needed to read the data.
"The first kind of improvement, towards
miniaturization, tends to
be a gradual evolution, but the second tends to
occur in major
steps," Scranton said.
"This breakthrough will allow us to stay on the
rapid growth
pace" of about 60 percent annual growth in drive
storage capacity,
he said.
The breakthrough IBM will announce is based on a
scientific
effect discovered in 1988. In 1994, IBM said it
successfully used
the discovery for the first time to create a
super-sensitive sensor
for detecting data on a hard disk.
According to IBM, the breakthrough, called Giant
Magnetoresistive (GMR) heads, could boost storage
density on
drive platters to more than 10 billion bits per
square inch.
In contrast, IBM said the first drive to deploy
the new technology
would set a density record with about 2.7 billion
bits per square
inch. That drive, the Deskstar 16GP, will be
available starting
next month and will hold 16.8GB (gigabytes) of
data, or enough
to hold eight hours of full-motion video.
The company also plans to announce a new series
of
high-performance drives, the Deskstar 14GXP, which
offers up
to 14.4GB of high-speed storage. Both families of
drives are for
desktop computers.
Suggested retail pricing for the Deskstar 16GP
family ranges
from <underline>$275 for a 3.2GB drive up
</underline>to<underline> $895 for the 16.8GB model.</underline>
The high-speed drives will range from
<underline>$675 for a 10.1GB drive</underline>
to <underline>$845 for the 14.4GB model.
</underline>
IBM will begin shipping drives to personal
computer
manufacturers worldwide next month and plans to
license the
technology to other disk-drive manufacturers,
Scranton said.
--
I got up feeling so down, I got off being sold out
I've keep the movie rolling, But the story's getting old now
I just looked in the mirror, Things aren't looking so good
I'm looking California, and feeling Minnesota. ...Soundgarden
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