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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jkb who wrote (3976)	11/20/1998 4:04:00 PM
From: Walter Morton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Bob Katzive of DISK/TREND, Inc. was kind enough to respond to my questons about flash vs. Microdrive and Clik: "Walter: Thanks for your email of 11/14. Sorry for the delay in responding, as I have been walking the miles of aisles at Comdex this week. In my opinion: Flash is most advantageous when used in smaller capacities, as its cost per unit is low relative to that of a disk drive. At higher capacities, the cost per megabyte is very much in favor of magnetic storage. As a result, I doubt that the Microdrive will compete strongly against flash where only a few megabytes of capacity is needed. The new Iomega Clik drive may be more of a problem, for at its 40 megabyte design point, the 10 dollar cost per media unit could be very attractive. Overall, I expect flash memory to be the favored technology below 40 megabytes, disk drives to be favores above 150 megabytes, and an application dependant mix in between. Flash, of course, offers advantages in environmental ruggedness and power drain, so the choice will be application and product segment driven. In short, it is not a "One size fits all" market, and I doubt that the Microdrive will cause any flash memory manufacturing company to go out of business. I would not expect Microdrive to cause declines in sales of flash memory cards, though it will probably limit (but not halt) growth in the high capacity sector of the market starting in 2000. Future Microdrives will move towards higher capacities--I would expect the next generation to offer 1 GByte capacity, assuming that the concept works out in practice and IBM is successful in generating enough sales to warrant further development. One of the problems with flash is that the need to have an erase cycle when rewriting will slow it down. Also, the higher capacity chips that use multi bit/cell technology are inherently slower than single bit cell technology. All of this will improve with time and smaller geometries, but probably won't match rigid drive performance. High write rate becomes increasingly important as camera pixel density increases, especially where photographers want cameras that can take photos rapidly in sequence. The Microdrive is designed to survive high shock loading because the head is ramp loaded/unloaded and is latched out of contact with the media except when operating. It is sealed, so contamination is unlikely to be an issue. The mass of the internal components is so low that bearing spalling due to shock is judged unlikely, though I don't have any hard data on this. In short, it looks like it would survive most "oops" type events. Of course, it does have moving parts....... You can get further Microdrive details on the web at www.storage.ibm.com/microdrive. For info on Iomega Clik see www.iomega.com/product/clik. I hope this addresses your concerns. Sincerely, Bob Katzive DISK/TREND, Inc. 1925 Landings Drive Mountain View, CA 94043 Tel 650-961-6209 Fax 650-969-2560 E-mail: bkatzive@disktrend.com Web: disktrend.com "