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Technology Stocks : Seagate Technology - Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Z Analyzer who wrote (419)	1/6/1999 9:24:00 AM
From: Stitch	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1989

Folks, I expect SEG may get a little momentum out of this story considering the broad perception will be that they are way ahead on a near field recording drive ala Quinta. <<TeraStor hits 6-month delay in NFR debut January 6, 1999 ELECTRONIC BUYERS NEWS via NewsEdge Corporation : Silicon Valley- TeraStor Corp. has suffered a six-month delay in bringing its novel near-field recording data-storage technology to market, and has consequently rewritten its product roadmap. Difficulties in designing and manufacturing the near-field recording (NFR) head itself have delayed the project until at least the second quarter of 1999, when initial samples are expected, executives said. They added, however, that the problems have been resolved. TeraStor's combination of optical and magnetic recording technology was originally scheduled to produce a 10-Gbyte removable storage drive using single-sided media in the fourth quarter of 1998, followed by a 20-Gbyte drive with twice the areal density in the second quarter of 1999. Under its latest roadmap revision, the San Jose-based company will ship both the single-sided 10-Gbyte drive and a dual-sided 20-Gbyte drive at about the same time. TeraStor executives said they expect a double-sided 40-Gbyte drive, with twice the capacity per disk, to ship sometime thereafter. While the capacity of the individual NFR drives is similar to recordable DVD products, TeraStor executives believe the NFR devices will compete against archival data-storage products, such as tape drives. TeraStor expects pricing for the devices to be unaffected by the delay; the 10-Gbyte drive should sell for $699 to $799, and the 20-Gbyte model for $999 to $1,199, said Jonathan Hubert, director of product marketing. "Over the last five months, we've spent most of our energy in development of our flying optical head," Hubert said. "We've delayed the program-that's the bad news. But because of the delay, we're now concentrating on the double-sided product." TeraStor has begun testing functional heads from some suppliers charged with developing the technology. However, heads have not yet been received from Yamaha Corp., whose responsibility is to produce the heads in volume. Fully functional drives will begin testing in January. TeraStor's three media suppliers-Imation Corp., Maxell Corp., and Tosoh Corp.-have all completed the transition from researching the media into reconfiguring their factories for volume production. The NFR drives are expected to yield internal data-transfer rates of 6 Mbytes/s, according to Hubert. Because the newer 20-Gbyte drive uses dual-sided media with the same areal density as that of the 10-Gbyte version, data-transfer rates will be the same.>>