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

To: Gus who wrote (8379)	6/2/2000 10:43:00 AM
From: Z Analyzer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

<<LTO remains my main reservation about Exabyte, >> Remember that LTO won't be on sale until compatibility between the vendors is resolved. This is an issue of unknown complexity. Beyond that, from my limited experience in watching the birth of new mid-range drives, they invariably have been very difficult: -M1 was so late and the launch so slow and troubled that Exabyte lost the entire mid-range market. -The DLT 7000 laucnch was a year late and very slow. -The DLT 8000, a presumably simple, modest improvement over the 7000 was also very late and undeniably (except by QNTM and a few others), problem plagued. The most interesting twist is that yesterday's DSS announcement lists the DLT 8000 transfer rate as 5 MBS down from hte 6 MBS at which the 8000 was released. Either an error or QNTM has been continually denying DLT 8000 problems so severe that they had to back down the transfer rate. -SDLT and LTO have slipped very badly from original scedules and timing is still at considerable risk. -M2 was late and took 5 months to get through launch problems but still is way ahead of the competition. -Quantum stated in a past conference call that the SDLT qualification would be long and iterative. -Seagate has told me thay expect a very slow LTO launch. Gus, perhaps you know from your experience with tape. Is there any chance that LTO will not have to go through the the long, slow ardous launch and qualification process which would put any serious volume off until at least the end of 2000. Have you seen any easy high performance tape births and launches? Thank, -Z