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

To: Gottfried who wrote (4100)	8/7/1998 12:20:00 AM
From: Stitch	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9256

GM, Yes...Orb has taken longer to get off the ground then originally planned. Not surprising in this market. FWIW they have their ceremonial roll out next week in the factory in Penang wih the Chief Minister of Penang attending and some hoopla planned. The LS-120 is far from dead. Compaq...while exiting the consortium over a year ago, is among the recent OEMs who have begun to offer the LS120 as an option on systems since last June coinciding with the PentiumII release. Others include NEC, Acer and Hitachi. The biggest players on the LS120 are Imation (3M spin off)and Mitsubishi, with OR technology and Exabyte also offering the drive. Few know that the consortium bought the technology from Iomega who abandoned it when they felt its lack of a migration path to higher densities and capacities were not worth the effort. However, the boxmakers have wanted badly to maintain backward compatibility with the floppy all along. So here is what is happening in this (at last) nascent market IMO. It is diverging into two camps. One is low end (Zip vs. LS120 with Caleb technology, Sony's HiFD, chasing with non LS120 floppy compatibles. There is also a 250MB non-compatible from Avatar which will surely die IMO.) The second is high end: (Jaz, ORB, and Syquest's "SyJet" and the new "Quest") It is this latter market that is very interesting to watch in terms of future apps. The floppy replacement market has the potential to be explosive however. Can you imagine having the product that everyone wants as a replacement for your floppy? Best, Stitch