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Ron- I am confident that the only way you'd know a particular hard-drive used "keepered media" would be identification of the patent no. printed on the sticker of the enclosure. As a consumer, you could care less if the drive used MR-heads vs. inductive, 5 platters vs 3 platters, or "keepered" media vs conventional media. You'd be more concerned with performance vs price (access rates, transfer rates, capacity), warranty, and documentation. Personally, I wouldn't care if my drive was made by Western Digital, Micropolis, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Seagate, IBM, Samsung or Hitachi. The one thing that keepered media offers that could possibly interest the consumer is the ability of it to slow the thermal decay of data. Test data indicates that the signal of the unkeepered media decays almost three times as fast as the keepered media signal. While this may not be a problem now, if areal densities continue to climb at a rate of 60% per year, decreasing the data bit size, it will increase the possibility thermal energy will reverse the magnetic direction of those bits. Now who would want a high capacity, unstable hard-drive? According to the brief technology update in the Data Storage May/June '97 issue, "Thermal decay becomes more significant as recording densities increase, ultimitely limiting the recording density to a value that is much lower than that attainable under more thermally stable conditions." I interpret this to mean that eventually, everyone will need keepered media. Unless they're willing to sell drives which produce frequent corrupt files. |
