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

To: TREND1 who wrote (12108)	6/20/2000 2:39:00 PM
From: TREND1	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 60323

Is this Dan Gillmor all wet ? He seems to think cameras will love this new small IBM disk drive. Please tell me he is all wet and WHY ! Larry Dudash Dan Gillmor: Big things in store from IBM's Microdrive BY DAN GILLMOR Mercury News Technology Columnist WE take technology milestones pretty much for granted these days, as we should. Otherwise we'd go ga-ga once a week or so. But let's make a small exception for a tiny disk drive, the size of a matchbook, which holds a gigabyte of information. And as IBM announces the latest version of its Microdrive today, it's worth understanding why this milestone transcends its predictability. There's no real surprise in this kind of announcement. It's been close to a sure thing for many years. Just as microprocessors double in power roughly every 18 months, disk drive capacities are doubling at a rate that borders on breathtaking. But there's ``something magical about hitting a gigabyte in that form factor,'' observes Danielle Levitas, an industry analyst who tracks storage developments for the research firm IDC. Imagine a palm-size video camera that can record a couple of hours of a child's birthday party, or other gadgets yet to be invented. We're not there yet, but with technology like this we're getting a lot closer. I remember when I got my first hard disk drive, back in the mid-1980s. It held a whopping 10 megabytes, a hundredth of the new Microdrive's capacity, and I wondered how I'd ever fill it up with data. That long-gone disk was huge in physical size in comparison with the Microdrive, too. That's the flip side of the progress coin -- as processors and disk drives get faster and hold more when you keep the size constant, they also maintain their current power and size in ever-smaller sizes. I don't wonder anymore whether we'll be able to fill up our hard disks with data, though I'm not certain precisely what that data will be. But the Microdrive forces us to wonder something interesting about the products of tomorrow. Putting chips into things makes them smarter. Your car is much more intelligent than an auto from a generation ago, and it runs better and longer and more efficiently. Put storage into things, and they can start remembering. I'm constantly annoyed when I return home after a power outage and have to reset, not just the time, but also my other settings, including favorite channels, on my videocassette recorder. The VCR could use some storage so it wouldn't forget my settings. It wouldn't take much storage for the VCR, certainly not a gigabyte or anything close, to let it remember my preferences. This isn't a job for something like the Microdrive. So what is? Most obviously, it's made to order for cameras. Put one of those babies into a digital camera and you can take lots of pictures before you have to start culling your photos or downloading them to your PC. Movies? IBM tells me the Microdrive will store an hour of video, though not of the highest quality. I'd like to carry my favorite music around on one of these disks, or a couple of them. Then I'd like to plug them into whatever playback device was handy -- the music system at home, the car stereo, my pocket MP3 player, whatever. Think more broadly, says Mark Bregman, general manager of ``pervasive computing'' at IBM. ``They can fit into portable devices that are becoming ubiquitous,'' he notes. Handheld game players would plainly benefit from more storage capacity for graphics and more game levels. Or consider how much digital audio you could fit into a voice recorder, and so on. The Microdrive and its eventual competitors will also be tailor-made for Palm, PocketPC and other handhelds. We'll have to make fewer choices about what data we want to carry around, though keeping everything synchronized will remain a chore. All of this will be taking place against a backdrop of network computing, where vast data farms hold most of humanity's knowledge. We're beginning to understand how to use processing power most appropriately in this environment -- letting server computers, PCs and other devices handle the appropriate parts of the computation. Not every device in the future will need its own storage. We'll be figuring this out as we go. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal (weblog.mercurycenter.com/ejournal). E-mail: dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917. PGP fingerprint: FE68 46C9 80C9 BC6E 3DD0 BE57 AD49 1487 CEDC 5C14.