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

To: SBHX who wrote (9807)	3/25/2000 12:50:00 AM
From: Gary Spiers	Respond to of 60323

I expect that unless battery capacity grows quickly, AA's are not going to power an MO drive very efficiently. Don't forget the Forbes article mentioned that Sanyo was one of the leading battery technology companies - who knows what they have up their sleeve? ;-) Of course, some extremely low power laser may change all that... IIRC the MO disks require a phase change to occur in the material and this requires a certain laser power level. Lower power level lasers have always been available -they just wouldn't work in this application. The way to reduce laser power consumption would be to increase the laser efficiency and the lasers are so efficient now that it is unlikely that this could be done in anything other than an incremental improvement IMHO. The root problem is that the MO disk has to be spun in order to read/write the disk and this provides problems wrt power consumption, spin up latency and shock/vibration. GaryS