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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (5966)	6/7/1999 4:57:00 PM
From: orkrious	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

crn.com WebTV drops hard disk for flash device By By Mark Hachman, Electronic Buyers' News San Mateo, Calif. 10:12 AM EST Fri., June 04, 1999 WebTV Networks Inc. has pulled a Seagate 1-Gbyte hard drive from its WebTV set-top boxes in favor of an 8-Mbyte flash card from M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers Ltd. A number of WebTV subscribers complained that the hard drive created a distraction, said a spokesman for the Mountain View, Calif., company. "Initially, subscribers were really excited about having a hard drive in there. But it wasn't really that great for a television environment. It was kind of loud." Instead, the WebTV Plus box will use an 8-Mbyte flash card from Newark, Calif.-based M-Systems for local storage. While analysts have been skeptical about the ability of such a low-capacity card to handle storage functions, the WebTV spokesman said the company had developed sophisticated methods of storing content within its own network, caching the data on its own servers. "We found we didn't need [the hard drive]," he said. WebTV's WebTV Classic set-top boxes never employed a hard drive. Seagate Technology Inc.'s low-cost, 8.1-Gbyte U4 hard drive is still included in the DISHPlayer set-top boxes co-designed by WebTV and EchoStar Communications Corp. and manufactured by EchoStar, the WebTV spokesman said.. A wholesale abandonment of hard drives in set-top boxes is unlikely, according to industry analysts. "I firmly believe that next-generation set-top boxes will have a hard drive in there as a primary storage device," said John Monroe, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., San Jose. Monroe said sales of hard drives for non-PC devices, including set-top boxes, were only about 1 million units in 1998, but will grow to 1.2 million units in 1999 and about 20 million in 2002.