to all:
I've been puzzled too by the insipid market reaction to AXC's wonderful promise of DST, DCT,and the increasingly likely wild card, and wild resultant stock ride, of KM. Here are some quotes from a June 96 Byte article on pages 91-96 on hard drives that initiated me to the complexities of the hard drive industry and may provide some light on the long wait for KM, and the promise of it.
"Hard drives can't stand still. Sure, the colossal 40MB drives of yesteryear also had magnetic platters rotating swiftly under hovering read-write heads. But the similarities w/ today's multi gig wonders stop there. The hard drives of today, and especially tomorrow, range deep into new territories including quantum mechanics, aerodynamics and dizzying spin speeds.As a result of such technologies, capacities are compounding at 60% EACH YEAR- A TENFOLD INCREASE IN CAPACITY EVERY FIVE YEARS. Analysts expect this rate to continue into the next century. the gray hairs of hard drive designers are due largely to the mutually interactive relationships of components. Want to increase capacity? Simple: move the heads closer to the surface of the disk. The heads can write and read smaller magnetic domains, and the smaller the domain, the more data each platter can hold. Of course, the closer the heads, the more you have to worry about the heads hitting the platter and completely shaving off the magnetic domains. So coat the platter with protective materials. You might want to redesign the aerodynamic properties of those heads too. With more data flowing past each head, you'll need bigger electronics, maybe even a bigger onboard cache to handle the increased thruput. Probably a good idea to change the algorithm for detecting each magnetic domain too. Don't forget to check that the smaller domains are still stable at the usual operating temperatures. Most likely, you'll need to shorten up the spindle length also, and design a new housing to hold the whole thing, and reposition all the mounting gear on the outside. ALL AT A COMPETITIVE PRICE OF COURSE. YOU GET THE PICTURE." All caps are my added emphasis.
From this very dense and informative article, it goes on for 5 more mindnumbing pages for a nontechie like me, some clear things emerge:
-Hard drives are incredibly complex, adding a new technology entails changing the whole product in some way
-Constant incremental changes have pushed the envelope of continuously increasing disk size and access speed, but wholly new technologies (such as IBM's MR)have been relatively slow to be introduced, and when introduced, have been slow to catch on over tried and true methods because...
-price/performance ratio is PARAMOUNT
There's more I could say, but here are my thoughts re: KM
If you take a "normal" (for the drive industry anyway) 60% annual growth pattern in size/speed and add in a whole new technology that tacks on an additional 35-38% improvement, you've got a major leap ahead, particularly if your competitors (MR being the prime example due to AXC's caution re: their KM and MR current incompatibility) can't make the same leap in price/performance.
Plus, AXC has repeatedly said the cost for all of this is NOMINAL, whatever that is (my guess, and only my guess of course, is it could be done for under $10 a platter, knowing the incredibly stingy economics of the going rate for manufacturers of high end disk drives) and so should eventually be incorporated.
I think the whole delay has not been that KM isn't wonderful, but, how soon can these companies testing it then change the whole disk drive to accomodate it? And, can it be then mass produced at the light speeds and absolutely enormous volumes the disk drive industry lives or dies by?
The latest 10Q said one drive manufacturer has gone so far as to test it for durability. I imagine they've been running that poor little KM test drive mercilessly without stopping (except for testing results?) ever since they got it into their disk drive torture chamber.
That said, I think KM will pass the tests before it, the prospect of some inductive and tri-pad or contact recording getting a good jump on MR manufacturers must be too good to pass up, for NOMINAL cost.
If adopted by some, AXC could be a 5 or 10 bagger from here, based on, let's say even $2 or $3 a drive x tens of millions of drives= analysts upgrades, momentum players dream stock, etc etc etc. GO AXC! |
