Kent:
Have been doing some research on storage - hard disk drive sector and flash memory - and one area that is set to explode is the consumer market for digital cameras and videos - if you buy the forecasts. I do. Here's why:
I'm not a photography fan, but even I must admit I've been looking into digital cameras, and have had a blast taking photos using regular film, scanning them in, and editing on MicroSoft's editor. You can make great web pages, cut and paste pictures of the kids and print, make cards, just a blast.
And I'm the last guy that gets into this photography stuff - my wife has to show me how to shoot the camera half the time and explain (again) what all the buttons are for. I have no idea what an f-stop is.
But if you get digital cameras, video with voice digital machines, you can make your own movies on your computer.
Now, you can just about guess how much memory this will all take. Yeah, those flash memory cards are great, but just won't cut the mustard for heavy duty storage and editing. Those 20 GB drives that are recently being introduced may be small stuff for these uses.
That leaves some real opportunities in the HDD sector. IBM is the technology leader and sales leader, but is not a pure play. SFLX is one company with HDD expertise that may benefit - in fact will benefit IMO.
Of course, to make the GMR heads will require some heavy duty investment in equipment - new sputtering techniques (vacuum deposition) are needed - and the precision needed for the layers on the GMR head are much much greater than for the MR head - much less the inductive heads that are now being phased out.
Will issue a full report in a week or so. I know we've had this conversation before, and people have asked "what are they going to do with all that memory" - even when the 8 GB drives were being announced.
Well, along with gaming, this is your answer. I'm a believer. Then again, as my co-editor Doug Fant says, we are either on the cutting edge or crazy. We're not sure which.
Joe |
