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Technology Stocks : Western Digital (WDC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fiberman who wrote (9882)	10/21/1998 10:25:00 AM
From: Mark Oliver	Respond to of 11057

I think everybody is going to have a 4.3 gig drive in the very near future. Now, you have WD, Maxtor, Fujitsu, and Samsung at least with 4.3 programs. If Fujitsu has started GMR from here that could add pressure, but in the end everybody will have this capacity in the near term. I do note though that Quantum seems to be late, but then they have the 6.4 gig Bigfoot which is great for the low end. Maybe not good for the high end. Seagate just announced some new drives for the Cheetah program that appear to have a greater areal density, but I've not seen the platter number. They claim a 50 gig drive on the high end. In the end though, it will be time to market as usual and it looks like the WD program is timely. They won't get very many weeks to profit, but that's better than nothing. Nice thing is they don't have to pay off IBM for the technology. They did this one all on their own. Makes you wonder when IBM will give them something useful? They probably won't profit enough though to pay off this warranty reserve. This TFI issue is what we should be looking at. Regards, Mark

To: fiberman who wrote (9882)	10/21/1998 11:14:00 AM
From: Carey Thompson	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 11057

O.K., Fiberman I will try to explain the 4.3G(igabyte) platform to the best of my ability. Using the 4.3G platform, 4.3G is the amount of storage WDC can store on a single side of the platter. For example, if a HDD contains 4 platters with data storable of 1 side, using the 4.3G platform the disk drive will store 4.3G X 4 = 17.2G of data. If the 4 platters have data storable on both sides, using the 4.3G platform the disk drive will store twice the bytes or 34.4G of data. This is a HUGE amount of storage. I just upgraded in March 1998 and received a state of the art Quantum Bigfoot HDD with 6.0G. I still have 4.0G of unused storage. My son's 486 handdown computer has .425G or 425K(ilobytes) of storage--that smaller amount is enough for all the kids software, games, homework, etc. Even though the 4.3G platform may be too much of a good thing, users will buy 4.3G platform HDDs in the resale market, if the price is reasonable, say under $300. Also, OEMs will place competitively priced 4.3G platform HDDs in new computers. This assumes the drives are reliable and guaranteed, which is a safe assumption for a WDC product. Good luck investing Carey Thompson