Study Group: Semiconductor Capital Equipment Experts (North America)

GLG News^SM Analyses by this Study Group's Leading Experts(?)

Vast small hard drives fuel new consumer applications and smaller computers

November 8, 2009

Analysis by:Thomas Coughlin, President,

Analysis of:Toshiba Introduces Two 1.8-Inch Hard Disk Drive Families for Both High Performance and Long Battery Life in Mobile Computing Applications | www.earthtimes.org

After its merger with Fujitsu, Toshiba is now the largest manufacturer of mobile hard disk drives (HDDs) (2.5 inch and 1.8 inch HDDs). Toshiba is also the largest manufacturer of 1.8-inch HDDs and the company has just introduced a HDD in this form factor with 320 GB storage capacity. This 2-disk 1.8-inch drive offers the highest storage capacity in such a small package and will enable more consumer and mobile computer applications

Optical disc drives being replaced by flash memory in computers?

November 4, 2009

Analysis by:Thomas Coughlin, President,

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 well as memory card formats. Downloading content and applications has become more common, replacing one of the big uses for optical drives in computers. As flash memory $/GB declines and as write speeds for flash devices improve will these devices replace current optical disk physical distribution formats?

Samsung and Numonyx See PRAM-PCM as Next Winner

October 3, 2009

Analysis by:Jim Handy, Director,

Analysis of:Samsung upbeat about PRAM market | www.digitimes.com

Flash memory will hit the end of its life in the next few years.Samsung and Numonyx are betting that phase-change memory, PRAM or PCM, will fill the void to become flash's successor.Other companies, Spansion, Macronix, SST, Sharp, and Hynix, have not disclosed their plans, but Intel, Toshiba, and Micron have outlined different plans.

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

September 22, 2009

Analysis by:Thomas Coughlin, President,

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 are dependent upon rare earth metals such as motors, hard disk drives, electronics and illumination. There are deposits of rare earth ores in the North America, South Africa, and Australia but it may take years to bring these online.

Dual Stage Actuator HDDs appear on SATA disk drives

September 21, 2009

Analysis by:Thomas Coughlin, President,

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 closer to the head. Dual stage actuators add some cost to the drive and increase servo control complexity but allow higher track density recording. Dual stage actuators had only appeared in some enterprise (high performance) HDDs from Seagate and other companies in that market to this point

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