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News In Review

November 17, 1997

Disk Drives Designed To Relieve Data Gluts

IBM offers high-capacity storage technology for PCs

By Bob Francis

A new generation of disk drives may help vendors and users fight back against the ever- swelling torrent of data and applications on desktops and servers.

IBM is expected to be first out of the gate with a new technology called giant magnetoresistive heads, which allows more data to be recorded on drives than was possible with previous technologies. IBM, which developed the technology in 1988, plans to offer a 16.8-Gbyte hard drive in a 3.5-inch format designed for desktop PCs. That's double the capacity of IBM's current largest PC disk drive.

IBM plans to offer the drives in its own PCs by year's end. In addition, it expects several other manufacturers, including Gateway 2000 and Dell Computer, to ship the drives. The new drives store 2.7 billion bits of data per square inch of disk, up from 1.7 billion bits in earli er models, company officials say.

IBM is not the only company that's rapidly ramping up disk capacity. Quantum Corp. last month released a 12-Gbyte hard drive in a larger 5.25-inch format, designed for PC servers. The average hard-drive capacity last year was around 1.2 Gbytes, says Jim Porter, president of Disk/Trend, a research group in Mountain View, Calif. Capacity growth "doesn't show any indication of slowing down," Porter adds. "Just four years ago, the average hard drive was a puny 200 Mbytes. What could you do with a drive that size today?"

Pushing The Limits
Not much, according to users who are pushing storage limits. Most users at Ernst & Young have notebooks with disk drives ranging in capacity from 1.8 Gbytes to 4 Gbytes. "We'll use 8-Gbyte drives when they become more [widely] available," says Jeff Held, director of the center for technology enablement in Ernst & Young's advanced technology group.

According to Kevin Reinis, director of performance storage products for IB M, the company plans to migrate its entire line of disk drives, including enterprise server and notebook models, to its newly announced technology during the next year.


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