MO disc agreement reached........................................
nytsyn.com
Agreement on Standards for Powerful New Disk
By CHESTER DAWSON
c.1997 Bloomberg News
OKYO -- Fifteen of the world's biggest electronics companies -- including Japan's Fujitsu Ltd., LSI Logic Corp. of the U.S. and Europe's Philips Electronics N.V. -- have agreed on standards for a powerful new computer disk.
The accord gives a boost to the latest magneto-optical, or MO, disk against less powerful DVD-RAM disks in the battle to become the preferred method of storing information in the next generation of personal computers.
``We think the MO market can grow from a million units a year today, to tens of millions of units when the MO will be the standard recording device in a PC,'' Fujitsu spokesman Mike Beirne said Friday.
Under the agreement, an MO disk made by Japan's Hitachi Maxell Ltd., for instance, can be used in a computer made by South Korea's LG Electronics Co. Unlike typical read-only disks, both MO and rival DVD-RAM disks -- both the size of compact disks used to record music -- allow computer users to rewrite information on the disk.
The new MO disk can store up to 6 gigbytes of informon, enough to hold a two-hour movie, according to Fujitsu, the world's biggest maker of MO disk drives. That's four thousand times the storage capacity of a standard computer floppy disk and more than twice the capacity of the current crop of DVD-RAMs.
Yet the sophisticated computer disk drives needed to read the new MO disks will cost around $500, or twice the price of a DVD-RAM drive and 20 times the cost of a standard $20 disk drive.
Some analysts wonder if average PC buyers will warm to high-powered, high-cost disk drives.
``It's too early to judge whether this 6-gigabyte optical disk can become a major product,'' said UBS Securities Co. analyst Yoshiharu Izumi.
The storage capacity of DVD-RAMs, backed by companies such as Toshiba Corp. and Hewlett-Pckard Co., and dard computer hard drives may catch up with the MO, even as their prices fall, Izumi said. Many of the companies that signed on to the new MO acted more as a form of ``insurance'' to hedge their bets than because they're convinced the product will be a commercial success, he said.
Some companies that agreed to the new 6-gigabyte standard have one foot in the enemy camp. Hitachi Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Sony Corp. are among the electronics manufacturers which have also pushed the development of the DVD-RAM.
Sony's caution reflects its scars from previous battles to champion standards for products such as the Digital Video Disk player and Video Cassette Recorder.
After a heated race to develop DVD systems, a group led by Sony struck a compromise in 1995 over a standard for DVD players with a rival consortium headed by Toshiba. That followed Sony's scrapping of its Betamax-format VCR in favor of VHS-format video players in the 1980s.
Companies which have agreed to adopt the new MO disk standard include South Korea's L.G. Electronics, Japan's Mitsubishi Chemical Corp., Olympus Optical Co., Sanyo Electric Co., Sharp Corp. and Tosoh Corp.
The MO group's members expect to begin initial shipments of MO disk drives by the spring of next year, Fujitsu said.
NYT-07-04-97 1019EDT< |
