GLG News by Hard Disk Drive Experts

* Hitachi president Kazuo Furukawa said that Hitachi wants to surpass Seagate’s HDD business profitability  * Furukawa-san said that Hitachi has the latest technology required to be competive in the HDD business  * He also said that there is synergy between Hitachi’s computer business and...

* Iomega had previously entered into an agreement with ExcelStor Great Wall Technology owned by the Chinese government  * Iomega terminated this purchase agreement with ExcelStor  * Iomega entered into an agreement to merge with EMC  * EMC will probably use Iomega as a means to move into...

* Hitachi introduced a 500 GB 2.5-inch hard disk drive in January 2008 but the product would not fit into a conventional 2.5-inch hard drive bay  * Fujitsu followed suit with a 500 GB 2.5-inch HDD announcement with a similar thicker drive package  * Samsung announced in March that they would...

* Seagate says that if SSDs start to threaten HDDs Seagate may sue SSD companies such as Intel and Samsung for patent infringement  * Seagate and WD have patents with many of the ways that a storage device communicates with a computer and SSDs may use some of these approaches  * SSDs are being...

*Western Digital introduced a 500 GB DVR expander product to add storage capacity to a digital video recorder with an external storage device  * Western digital plans to offer a 1 TB version of this product this year  * WD joins Seagate/Maxtor and others with external storage products to expand...

*  A start-up company, Pliant Technology announced a solid state flash drive for enterprise  applications  *  Pliant joins companies such as STEC in bringing flash memory to enterprise applications that require high throughput such as transaction processing  *  In...

* Sandisk announced that they will start shipping 3-bit per storage cell NAND flash memory in March or April, 2008 * Currently the densest flash memory is 2-bit per cell multilevel cells (MLC) * The technology was co-invented with long-time Sandisk partner, Toshiba * The technology will be...

* Encryption is used by many people and organizations to hide their information from unauthorized access  * Researchers at Princeton University were able to demonstrate a technique for finding the encryption key for software-based encryption programs  * With the encryption key these researchers...

*The HD DVD Format, promoted by Toshiba and several other consumer electronics companies has been competing with the Blu-ray format for the next generation of HD video distribution  *Just before the CES in early January Warner announced that they were pulling their titles from the HD DVD format...

* Yoichiro Tanaka, senior manager of Toshiba’s Storage Device Division gave a talk at an IDEMA Japan event  * He disagreed with three analysts that spoke before him that HDDs were threatened by flash memory  * While Tanaka-san recognized the important role that flash memory provided for mobile...