ITotals - December `2002
Data storage
It's interesting to observe the news focus increasingly shift from hard disks towards alternative data storage media. Take this month for instance: optical disk storage has the maximum coverage in IT press, with quite little said about hard disks and about the same coverage given to prospective technologies. This coverage structure suggests certain reasoning.
As for hard disks, the past month was not notable for any bright news. The U.S Trade Commission approved the Hitachi-IBM bargain that resulted in establishing Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, of which nobody had any doubts. A really exciting news is that at last first Serial ATA hard disks by Maxtor appeared in stores in Japan, albeit at transcendental prices. Although we have already received a 120 GB Seagate SATA V specimen of our own, these disks are unlikely to be offered for mass sales soon.
More realistical are the new Barracuda lines having renovated markings - 7200.7, 7200.7 Plus.
Interestingly, the new hard disks are coming to take the place of Barracuda ATA V, but where has the sixth generation gone? The modifications differ in the cache size - 2 or 8 MB and in the capacities: 40-160 GB for the former, and 120-160 for the latter. There is also a Low-End offering - Barracuda 5400.1! I wonder why on earth Seagate decided to deface the trademark by introducing a model offering less than 5400 rpm? Nevertheless, that is a fact - meet the heir to the no less famous Seagate U series, an Ultra ATA/100 40 GB hard disk measuring as small as 2 cm in height, the average seek time 12.5 ms.
Of prospective solutions, TDK declared new shockproof magnetic heads for hard disks able enduring 1000G shocks during the operation! This is almost the level of flash memory storage. Let's wait for the second half of the year when the company starts the mass production. By the time, the newly awake iVDR alliance who promised to demonstrate first CES disk samples might start manufacturing these products - 2.5" SerialATA-based cartridges aimed for computers and household appliances.
As for the optical storage media drives, things with them are in full swing. For the past month alone, as many as 20 new models of CD-ROM, DVD-R, CD-RW and DVD/CD-RW drives of various makes and modifications were presented! There were also new chipsets like the new Sanyo controller with support for the HD-BURN that allows doubling the CD recording density. Then go new documents sort of newer DVD+RW and DVD+R specifications issued by Philips, and finally new disks like 40X 800 MB declared by TDK.
In the coming spring, the Sony/Nichia alliance is starting to manufacture blue lasers, with Sanyo and Sharp as the would-be competitors. We're in for flood of news on optics as soon as new alliances start fighting each other in earnest and the DVD-RAM, DVD-RW versus DVD+RW confrontation will be no more than childish sports.
This will give new causes for wars which are being prepared just nowadays. Next year Matsushita and Ricoh are about to start creating a new technology of optical disks that allows storing 1.5 TB data on each, which is an implementation of the 3D 10-layer optical media principle, something close to the holography. And this niche is abundant with fortune-seekers.
For instance, InPhase, a well-known division of Lucent, received a $2 mln U.S.Government grant for the development of new holographic media materials, so the joint work with the partner, Hitachi-Maxell, will gain momentum. Last month Aprilis, a Polaroid's "daughter", also specializing in holography, acquired 21 patents to do with this field from Manhattans Scientific. Up to now, Aprilis' most outstanding achievement has been the 200 GB WORM-disk, so let's see how far it's going to advance.
The stakes are high, so the contenders are desperately striving to the finish as fast as they can because the first to finish will create and rule the standard, and who knows - maybe press the grandees of today. Another reason to hurry on is new discoveries, not the holography alone. The universities of Juta and Ohio are doing research in polymeric photomagnetism: as investigations of this unique phenomenon have shown, these materials if magnetized through light induction create structures which are in a way similar to three-dimensional fractals on the nano-level. Every year brings several discoveries like these which could be made use of for creating future-generation data storage media.
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