I too believe it will be a profitable ADDITION to Quantums mix of
offered products, but I don't see it something revolutionary that will come in and replace any other technology they currently have. The reasons for this perspective are simple:
1: Because it is a magneto-optic technology, then it will be limited to single platter drives for the forseeable future. What this means is that using 3.5" disk, the maximum capacity for a drive using this technology will be around 20GB.
2: Because the the data density is so high, it will not be able to be spun at high rpm or else you will have a "data overrun" situation.
Either case is bad from the standpoint of overall performance.
What I do see is that the technology is very good for a product similar to a CD-ROM drive. Removable media, slow access (compared to
disk drive) but high throughput. I don't remember what the capacity of a CD-ROM drive is exactly, but I believe it is less than 1GB... this would translate to a more than twenty-fold increase in virtually the same package AND it would be writable. An excellent backup device for individual PC's or a building block for a juke-box system. The product(s) that currently fill this space are those from Iomega, the Zipp and Jazz drives. (100KB and 1GB, respectively) Both products are hot. There's also a lot of additional money to be made on media which is a proprietary product. (For instance 5 units of Jazz media cost about as much as the drive does, and probably represent more than 2X the $profits.) On the very low end, it could be somewhat competetive with DLT in a juke box offering.
So in theory (this is all strictly conjecture on my part) NFR has the potential to provide a boost to QNTM's profit situation similar to that currently enjoyed by their DLT offerings. The unknowns are what kind of other competition will be out there in the same time frame.
The faster they can execute on this the better.
>> but the buzz is low cost, lots of space, really fast. <<
The only comment on the above statement is about the "really fast" part. This statement is true only in one dimension, and that is from the standpoint of throughput (or how fast data can be transferred once it has been located on the disk. The other dimension is the time it takes to put the head over the data on the disk (seek time), and this will be quite slow compared to even a low end disk drive.)
Chuck |
