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

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (4441)	9/14/1998 5:31:00 PM
From: Frodo Baxter	Respond to of 9256

>I ask because it seems like Quantum is a key developer here as they have been with other "Ultra" named technologies, but they don't seem to get much financial benefit. Sure they do. The Fireball ST, the first UltraATA/33 drive, was time-to-market, time-to-volume leader for about 6-9 months. The Viking II with Ultra2 SCSI came out ahead of Seagate's Ultra2 Cuda, and allowed Quantum to snare a couple small accounts, like, I dunno, Dell. There's no reason to believe Quantum won't be the first to market with UltraATA/66 and Ultra160 drives. There's a lot of hype about new-fangled interfaces like Firewire and Fibre Channel, but let's not forget one thing, they're just interfaces. Extend the bandwidth of an old, reliable (i.e. cheap) interface, keeping it backward compatible, and people start scratching their heads about why they need to migrate to the unproven new-fangled stuff. Note: make sure you understand the distinction between FC drives and FC servers. An FC server can use SCSI drives internally.

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (4441)	9/15/1998 4:59:00 AM
From: Pierre-X	Respond to of 9256

SCSI, as an evolutionary backward-compatible technology has a built-in market. At 160MB (over 1 gigabit) Ultra3 is performance competitive with Fibre Channel (AFAIK), and most likely quite a bit cheaper as well. Market leaders benefit from the establishment of a true open standard, since standards tend to benefit industries as a whole. It's possible that SCSI, like UV and DUV litho, has gotten a new lease on life via "normal science" advances. I certainly haven't heard much about 1394 these days.