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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron M who wrote (7675)	1/2/2000 1:29:00 PM
From: Mark Adams	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Thanks for the post; very enlightening on the failure of the APM/WDC trailing edge TFI approach. This section below seems particularly applicable for two of my holdings, RDRT and HMTT. Improvements to existing GMR heads will easily enable them to handle densities of 20 Gbits/inch2. "We are still brainstorming for 40", said a spokesperson for TDK Corp of Japan. Fuji Electric Co, Ltd of Japan is at a similar stage, "We have established technology for 20-Gbits/inch2 recording media at the volume-production level, and the technological barriers to the development of a 40-Gbit/inch2 technology have been cleared." If I understand correctly, Fujitsu and TDK had effectively demonstrated 20Gb/in2 by July 99. I had to look into how that fit with RDRTs public announcement history, as shown below. HMTT/RDRT Technology demos 11/03/99: 36Gb/in2 08/03/99: 26.5Gb/in2 (38 billion bytes/platter) 05/17/99: 20.9Gb/in2 11/04/98: Licensed GMR technology from German company (Juelich) 09/08/98: 13.5Gb/in2 Clearly a close horse race! The article suggests a 2 year lag between these demos and production ready products. The RDRT/WDC announcement for 9.1/10.2 GB/platter says they are using 6.6Gb/in2. This was the only clue I could find on areal density in recent press releases, the others mention GMR but no indication of areal capacity. Since the other releases are at roughly the same GB/platter, perhaps we could say they too are 6.6Gb/in2 and this represents the early generation transition to GMR by desktop drive mfgs. The recent qual announcements suggest that RDRT managed the MR to GMR transition and has a future if they manage the near term financing issues. That they've annouced sales into MXTR/Samsung/WDC/SEQ/HDD in the past year suggests to me that the mfgs have looked into the financial viability of their vendor.