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

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (1617)	11/23/1997 9:18:00 PM
From: Gottfried	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Mark, you asked >>Can Iomega sell disks later using MR technology that will run in drives first designed to use inductive heads? This market offers an interesting use of heads. If they ever got the popularity of Zip drives, it would be huge. I wonder if they could put MR heads into a Zip disk?<< MR heads have separate read and write elements. The disks used with them have a higher coercivity (translation: it takes a stronger magnetic field to write to them). So, no - the disks have to be designed either for TF inductive or for MR heads. I see no reason why a future ZIP drive could not be designed with MR heads. But disks would not be interchangable between drives with MR heads and drives with TF inductive heads. You also said >>if this is the future for Iomega and Syquest, will they survive the advent of affordable near field technology from TeraStor?<< I think it will be years before Terastor's technology will be as affordable as existing technology. Terastor's technology is considerably more complex (they need optics). It took years for TF inductive and MR heads to get to under $10/head. Also consider that drives with MR heads have been on the market around 7 years (IBM), but still have not completely displaced TF inductive heads, primarily because they cost more. It is not clear to me exactly where the "sweet spot" is, capacity wise, for removable drives. Too much capacity on one single disk and you'll be reluctant to share it.<G> Gottfried