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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John M who wrote (2997)	7/15/1998 9:58:00 AM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17679

Could a diskmaker come in and make dst no big deal. If I thought that might happen in the near future, I would not be holding AXC. Assuming that the storage density of tape and disk surfaces are comparable, think about the surface areas involved. If you disassemble a disk drive, you'll find a couple of platters, of which on each only part of the top and bottom surfaces are used. There is the problem of track circumference decreasing with the radial position. In the early days, the sectors per track was fixed, so only a band where the circumferences did not differ extremely could be used. Now there are disk drives which can handle variable sectors per track, but it is a definite complication. Now think about pulling all the tape out of a cassette, and how much surface area that represents. Winchester type disk drives are sealed, so with each group of platters you need a whole drive, head, electronics, power supply, etc. Tapes are cheap because you can have one drive and as many tapes as you want. Jazz drives have changeable platters, but these are expensive and can't reach the capacity of sealed drives because they have to account for the possibility of dust: meaning the heads are probably different and can't be as close to the platter, which lowers the recording density. But technology has a way of sneaking up on you. In 1970, who would have predicted what we have today?