Thomas Coughlin

President, Coughlin Associates

Member of the Technology Council

Council Member Biography

Tom Coughlin is the President of Coughlin Associates, Inc. He is an acknowledged authority on data storage products including storage devices, network attached storage, storage area networks, and storage applications. Dr. Coughlin has held senior engineering and management positions at companies such as Seagate, Maxtor, Micropolis, Syquest and Ampex. His responsibilities include technical evaluations, project management, market and technology reports, technical article writing, and conference organizing. He is also very involved in IDEMA, A senior member of IEEE and past chairman of SCV Magnetics and Consumer Electronics Society as well as past SCV Section Chairman. Dr. Coughlin has been publicity chair of the 1992, 1996, and 2001 TMRC conference and he is the organizer of the annual Storage Visions Conference. (This is me - Update Profile)

Employment History

2001 - present: President, Coughlin Associates

GLG News^SM Analyses by Thomas Coughlin(?)

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Optical disc drives being replaced by flash memory in computers?

November 4, 2009

Analysis by:Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Analysis of: PC makeover: slimmer profile, no DVD drive | www.mercurynews.com

Many PC makers are not including optical drives, especially for laptops and netbooks. Leaving out optical drives is being done not to reduce cost but to allow slimmer laptop and netbook computers. Flash memory with built in programs and entertainment content are now on the market in USB as wellas...

Rare earth metals ban by China could impact hard disk drive production

September 22, 2009

Analysis by:Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Analysis of: World faces hi-tech crunch as China eyes ban on rare metals exports | www.telegraph.co.uk

China has been the single largest supplier country for rare earth metals such as terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, lutetium, neodymium, europium, cerium and lanthanum. China is contemplating a ban of some of these metals and restrictions on supply on many others. Many vital technologies aredependent...

Dual Stage Actuator HDDs appear on SATA disk drives

September 21, 2009

Analysis by:Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Analysis of: Western Digital debuts 2 TB, 7200 RPM Caviar HDDs | www.techspot.com

Western Digital announced that their new 2 TB 7,200 RPM Caviar HDDs use dual actuators. Dual (actually dual-stage) actuators provide a coarser movement of the recording head to tracks using head arms moved by a conventional voice coil motor while a finer motion is provided using a piezoelectric actuator...

High capacity hard disk drive components proliferate

September 21, 2009

Analysis by:Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Analysis of: SDK Starts Shipments of 2.5-inch 334 GB HDD Media | www.marketwatch.com

Showa Denko, the largest independent magnetic disk manufacturer, has started shipping 2.5-inch hard disks with 334 GB capacity. This disk formats are those used in laptop computers and smaller external hard disk drives (especially where power is off the same USB interface as the data transfer).The...

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