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Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D.J.Smyth who wrote (8410)	3/19/1999 11:33:00 AM
From: Frank Drumond	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 10072

You can apply MR technology to flexible media. Most tape drives now are using MR heads. Frankly, I don't now if GMR is precluded from use on flexible media or not. clik! uses the same recording techniques and densities as the Zip 250. Iomega is just leveraging development across these two new products. Down the road I see no reason that they can't use MR for clik! type products. Turning on new products with MR is non-trivial from a production point of view. It takes a lot of expertise and time to get wafer yields up for recording heads. It is always good to have some lower volume product to perfect a head with before shifting the technology to high volume products. This is probably the greatest risk for the Orb product. Investments are huge and part costs are high since per wafer head yields are typically low on the front end. The risk for Orb is that they are obviously forward pricing the drive since the volume production is the only way to make a profit at their price point. It will take time and cash for Orb to get to volume....