GLG News by Hard Disk Drive Experts

* Hitachi announced a 2.5-inch form factor disk drive with single drive capacity of 500 GB—the highest so far in this form factor  * Hitachi added another disk (3 total) and heads to achieve this with a resulting drive thickness that is 3 mm thicker than the industry standard 2.5-inch for laptops...

* Just before the start of the CES in January 2008 Warner Brothers announced that they were dropping support for the HD-DVD format * The company announced that the would begin exclusive new releases in Blu-ray format later this year (after May 2008) * In announcing the decision Barry Meyer, Chairman...

* EMC said that it will start offering solid state drives with flash memory for high transaction rate applications * The solid state drives EMC is using come from STEC * The advantage for the flash devices is stated to be much faster data input and output compared to hard disk drives (30 times faster)...

* Reports from iSuppli are that the 1.8-inch hard drive equipped iPod Classic contains $190 worth of components. The product sells for $349 leaving significant margin over the costs of production. * Estimates of sales of iPod Classic are 3.1 million units in 2007 compared to 26 million iPod Nanos and...

·         Dell announced that it will acquire storage startup EqualLogic for $1.4 billion dollars. ·         EqualLogic makes scalable iSCSI storage for IP SAN storage networks ·        ...

·         Samsung will introduce a 1.3-inch form factor hard disk drive at the 2008 CES ·         The camera is intended primarily for handheld camcorders where HDDs are becoming very popular   ·        ...

• Sources indicate that Silver Lake Partners is looking into a possible investment in Hitachi’s disk drive division• Silver Lake was involved in an earlier investment in Seagate Technology taking them private and then public again a few years ago• Reported discussed...

Hitachi Global Storage Technology has lost money almost every quarter since it was created by the merger of Hitachi and IBM’s disk drive units.In calendar 2006 the company lost $375 million, 60% more than in 2005.Hitachi provides a bit less than 20% of all the hard disk drives in the world, second only...

Toshiba introduced a 1.8-inch form factor hard disk drive with storage capacities as high as 160 GB.This is a 2 platter product with areal densities as high as 228 gigabits per square inch.In addition to higher storage capacity the product also uses about one third less power to operate than earlier...

Samsung has introduced a 160 GB Capacity 1.8-inch hard disk drive.This product is geared to portable device such as ultralight notebooks and video players.This is the highest announced capacity for a 1.8-inch disk drive.Samsung continues to push hard disk drive areal density.