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Technology Stocks : Seagate Technology - Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stitch who wrote (1708)	4/8/2000 12:05:00 PM
From: Z Analyzer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1989

<<Extension of horizontal recording has a lot of enablers (challenges) attached to it: like continuous film media, ultra smooth surfaces, load/unload mechanisms, secondary actuators, better control of head geometry, better control of contaminants, better control of resonance, etc etc. >> What about the challenges of vertical recording?

To: Stitch who wrote (1708)	4/12/2000 6:44:00 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1989

Dr. Jack Judy over at the University of Minnesota MINT Center is working on the current assumption that perpendicular recording can go up as high as 1000 Gbits/in2. Methinks the industry will be acutely sensitive to the superparamagnetic limit (40-70 Gbits/in2??) and its implications for data integrity especially after the way Toshiba got clocked $2.1 billion to settle that statistically-defective floppy controller class action lawsuit in Texas. I believe Compaq is in the process of recalling about 1.8 million laptops with the same potential problem. Others are sure to follow. By the way, RDRT just consolidated its entire operations in Thailand, it seems, as Sumimoto took a $100 million estimated charge for dissolving its JV with RDRT. Moving closer to Seagate, Thailand's single biggest employer, and IBM? I think it's fair to ask at what point RDRT and the other independent head manufacturers will come to the conclusion that this niggling 19th century ideal of free and open competition has to adjust to the 21st century where waging a fierce density race on high-volume single platter drives cannot be anything other than ruinuous and disastrous for the industry.