I remember Gus saying something about the following, that it would signal the limits of disk drive capacity and result in a lot of heat on the platters which could be dissipated by the keepering layer. So is keepering still in our future?
On Wednesday, disc-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) announced that it would use "perpendicular recording" to increase the storage capacity of its drives. The company has already prepped a 2.5-inch, 160-gigabyte drive for laptops, and intends to be among the first to roll out other data storage products that take advantage of the new technique.
Without getting too tech-geeky about it, perpendicular recording improves on current storage technology by allowing bytes of information to be stacked on a disc drive vertically, like a skyscraper, rather than horizontally, like, um, a strip mall.
Good for Seagate, of course, but its particular block is crowded, and fierce competition is making rent (to stick with the metaphor) increasingly cheap. In addition to well-heeled competitors such as Toshiba (OTC: TOSBF) and Hitachi(NYSE: HIT) -- both of which have perpendicular plans of their own -- scrappier rivals such as Western Digital (NYSE: WDC) and Maxtor (NYSE: MXO) might soon join the fray. |
