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To: DiViT who wrote (30194)	3/3/1998 4:52:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

New IBM one inch disk drives could be used in MPEG video cameras, and other devices.............. techweb.cmp.com Posted: 3:00 p.m. EST, 3/3/98 IBM shows tiny 1-inch 'consumer' disk drive By Rick Boyd-Merritt PASADENA, Calif. -- IBM Corp. disclosed work on a 1-inch hard disk drive at the Mobile Insights conference here yesterday. The matchbox-sized prototype drive, which fits into a new form factor defined by the CompactFlash Association, could carry as much as 400 Mbytes and cost $200, if IBM moves ahead with plans to produce the drive next year. "This is a type of product that's so new you have to get people thinking about how they might use it," said William C. Healy Jr., general manager of Mobile Storage Products for IBM in San Jose, Calif. "We have interest from digital camera makers, and we think that could be a first application. Beyond that it could go into smart cellular phones or consumer appliances we might not even imagine." The product is still at the concept stage, Healy said. Final plans for designing two chips that would be used in the product have not been made. But IBM's goal is to have a working technology demonstration at Comdex/Fall for a product that could ship in 1999, he said. Current plans call for the drive to use giant magneto-resistive heads, combined with standard rotating media with the aim of ultimately offering drives that scale up to a Gbyte in capacity and down to $99 in price. "Our goal is to focus on manufacturability, not on pushing the leading edge of areal capacity with this product," Healy said. "To a large extent, the heads, disks and motors are not new technologies, but existing ones slimmed way down." The new IBM product would target a market where others have tried and failed in recent years. Companies such as Integral Peripherals and MiniStor made and abandoned plans for 1.8-inch drives for PDAs and subnotebook computers several years ago. Hewlett-Packard tried to leapfrog those efforts with a 1.3-inch Kitty Hawk disk drive, but that effort was ultimately canceled when the handheld-computer market was slow to develop. "We think the market has fundamentally changed," said Healy. "This is a consumer drive. Manufacturers of motion MPEG cameras are already interested in using this, although their volumes are small. But we think we can move this to a mass market." The drive is being designed to fit in a new 5-mm high version of the CompactFlash socket defined by flash-card maker SanDisk Corp. That format uses an ATA interface and a PCMCIA-like socket. Healy said he thought the product would coexist with flash cards whose main volumes are in 1- to 10-Mbyte capacities today.