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

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (1712)	12/7/1997 6:05:00 PM
From: William T. Katz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Mark, Thanks for the information on RDRT supplying Iomega. I inferred from your post that RDRT also supplies some MR heads to Syquest? From that point, it does look like RDRT might do well because IOM is shipping out their drives in volume. Just goes to show that marketing will make up for technological edge. Most will say the Syquest drives are better but IOM wins because of momentum. Looking at some of the removable media specs, particularly the ORB drive, I was amazed at the capacity/speed and low-cost media. Fixed disk drives have an inherent advantage in that they have no removable components. So I assume that theoretically, removable media can never equal the performance of the fixed drives due to contamination problems ... am I correct in this assumption? A friend of mine recently asked how those Zip and Jaz drives were so fault-tolerant since you could almost open up the media to the elements. I'm still curious as to the types of removable media drives that could be made using NFR heads. The drives would be more expensive due to the additional optical components but the density should be much higher. So if ORB media can achieve 2 gb = $30, why couldn't NFR achieve 20 gb = $30 media? With cheap MPEG-2 codecs on the way, that would allow digital VCRs using NFR drives to roughly record 1 hr analog signal for $1.50 (similar to 2 hr VHS tape for $3). [I have to double check the MPEG-2 rates] -Bill