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To: Andrew who wrote (12497)	11/15/1997 7:50:00 AM
From: Nine_USA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

Excerpted from the SI Disk Drive Sector thread Re: Nov 13, 97 WDC Shareholder's Meeting After the main session I managed to speak a bit with Kathy Braun, Pres. and CEO of the Personal Storage division: (she) "hinted at some kind of drive interface revolution in the works" Full post thread is shown below: ---------------------------------------------------------------- To: A.S.Ong Yiu (1559 ) From: Pierre-X Friday, Nov 14 1997 9:50PM EST Reply #1560 of 1562 Re: Nov 13, 97 WDC Shareholder's Meeting __Here are my full notes on the meeting yesterday. __The text of the presentation is already available on the WDC website, and the precise link was posted by William Leiby in WDC #7577. __My notes cover Haggerty's responses to various questions from shareholders, including mine: ú limited visibility in competitor's pricing and capacity expansion plans ú Currently 11 MR head producers vs 5 TFI ú Hiring freeze on -nonproduction- personnel ú But Micropolis shutdown is opportunity to hire skilled people in a very tight labor market ú Alleged that industry was broadly cutting back on production. [I questioned him about the need for ALL players to play ball for this to be effective, but his answers were noncomittal.] ú Admitted that price drops were probably result of overproduction ú WDC has historically been able to maintain a $10/unit pricing premium due to factors like reputation. ú Noncommital about possibility to leapfrog quickly to GMR ú WDC is totally committed to the HDD business which is their one and only focus. After the main session I managed to speak a bit with Kathy Braun, Pres. and CEO of the Personal Storage division: ú WDC makes ~30% of their own platters (500 employees?) ú RDRT MR heads looking very good [I assume she meant quality and yield] ú APM fumbled badly, they are in transition to MR but she confirmed that their R&D spending is low ú WDC is in the process of qualifying head -stackers- since heads are not constrained but head stack assemblies (HSAs) are in short supply ú Confirmed that the yield problems on the 1.7m/p drives were APM products, and that they are moving away from it ASAP ú Fujitsu is the major aggressor, and the near term depends on their actions ú Confirmed that hi-cap drives (e.g. 9GB) were yielding very well ú She expressed surprise at the oversupply in the current quarter, as the Dec quarter has historically ALWAYS been tight ú Alleged that NEC is cutting back HDD production ú Hinted at some kind of drive interface revolution in the works Pierre-X

To: Andrew who wrote (12497)	11/15/1997 10:49:00 AM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

Andrew, I don't think it is that obvious. The major difficulty this creates for GE vendors is that they can't sell the idea that you can simply drop a GE switch into your existing LAN and expect it to work as advertised. Even the author of this SUN article points out that for most people installing GE will require significant recabling: sun.com He also makes the point that in terms of fiber, going from single mode to multimode, cuts down your effective LAN diameter with ATM from 20 k to 2 k. With FC the maximum distance is 10 k for gigabit speeds and 30 k for quarter speed FC. If you go to the technical FC information on the Ancor site: ancor.com - you find the following data: Single Mode Fibre 100 MB/s up to 10 km 1062.5 Mbaud Longwave laser 50 MB/s up to 10 km 531.25 Mbaud Longwave laser 25 MB/s up to 10 km 265.6 Mbaud Longwave laser 50-Micrometer Multimode Fibre 25 MB/s up to 2 km 265.6 Mbaud Shortwave laser 50 MB/s up to 1 km 531.25 Mbaud Shortwave laser 62.5-Micrometer Multimode Fibre 25 MB/s up to 1 km 265.6 Mbaud Longwave LED 12.5 MB/s up to 500 m 132.8 Mbaud Longwave LED I noticed a couple of things: 1. Although GE purportedly has "borrowed" FC's physical layer, they are clearly not equivalent. Neither of the laser wavelengths mentioned in the Sun article (850nm or 1300nm) are in the above standards. 2. GE apparently has no current single-mode standards. I think it would probably take an engineer with a lot of experience in this area to explain why there are differences based on these differences in physical parameters. As a footnote, Sun is high on GE - in spite of the fact that they are one of a few vendors with a high speed ATM card (622 Mbps). They *have* chosen a GE OEM - Alteon.