All is not well in the field of erasable magneto-optical disks. Latest, although preliminary, figures for 1994 from researcher International Data Corp show that worldwide the 5.25 market is stagnating: 148,000 units were sold, worth $202m, compared with last year’s 141,000 units, worth $179m; the disproportionate rise in revenue was due to the introduction of 650Mb capacity disks that were more expensive. The 3.5 market is more bouyant, up to $296m and 540,000 units from 258,000 units and $296m in 1993. But later this year Sony Corp will launch a 3.5 drive that will be incompatible with all existing ones and observers predict this will confuse an already bewildered market. And while all this is happening there is the possibility that advances in traditional storage media and the introduction of erasable phase change, a purely optical technology, may herald magneto-optical’s permanent banishment to niche markets.
Niche markets
But how did this all happen? In the late 1980s, magneto-optical technology was going to overthrow tape and magnetic disks as the main storage medium. However, manufacturers’ inability to offer significant performance improvements, failure to compete with traditional storage media on cost per Megabyte, and the plethora of standards has meant that the market did not blossom as expected. Industry watcher St Peter, Minnesota-based Technology Forums blames magneto-optical’s failure to match magnetic media’s increases in areal density. The company has calculated that between 1988 and 1993, magnetic disk areal density grew by 56%, magneto-optical by only 6.5%. IDC is similarly critical of the way manufacturers handled the market: it says that in a highly cost-sensitive market, manufacturers have been unable to show a cost per Megabyte reason for users to buy magneto-optical drives. IDC’s Stan Corker says manufacturers have approached the market, especially the 3.5 personal computer-based market, the wrong way round. Rather than solving the cost, they’ve been trying to up the capacity and sell it at the same price and that’s no good for the personal computer market. And his colleague in Vienna, Bob Payton, said if magneto-optical technology was to avoid being doomed to niche markets it would have to double its capacity every year for the next two to three years. But he said there wasn’t the technology to do that. Players in the field would disagree: Maxoptix Corp, with some of the fastest, highest-capacity disks and drives around, says things can only get better. By the end of the year 2.6Gb capacity will have been reached; improvements will be made to rotational speed and the read channel to increase throughput. Within two years, capacities will reach 8Gb and magneto-optical drives will have direct overwrite. Fujitsu Ltd reckons it will have a direct overwrite product by the year-end. And platter costs will have fallen so much that cost per Megabyte will be less than for magnetic disks.
By Maya Anaokar
Even if the assembled ranks of magneto-optical disk makers are just putting a brave face on things, for them it makes commercial sense to take magneto-optical technology to its limits. They have invested heavily in research and fabs; fabs that made the first generation of products can make the predicted 10Mb products, so giving them a return on their investment. Fujitsu, for example, is sticking with 3.5 magneto-optical and intends to push it heavily. It will provide tools, software and applications to give people a whole storage package. IBM Corp, although planning a phase change product, is working on third-generation magneto-optical technology. But many in the field are concerned about Sony’s plans to bring yet another type of magneto-optical drive on the market. Dr Ed Engler, head of IBM’s Storage Systems Division in San Jose said Sony’s plans would fragment the market. Chris Steele, technical marketing specialist for Fujitsu in the UK, was harsher: Sony is trying to screw it up because they never had a 230Mb product so they are out of the market and losing
out. But Sony is quite unrepentent. It accepts all of IDC and Technology Forum’s criticisms about the market but says that its 3.5 disk drive will be more efficient than any other and offer backward compatibility with the potential to advance. Whether it fragments the market or not, Sony is sticking with magneto-optical technology and is scathing of phase change products. So is Fujitsu, not surprisingly with its plans for magneto-optical technology: Chris Steele said phase change products were too low performance to compete with magneto-optical. In theory phase change should be faster but there’s no product that proves it, he said. Also he is concerned, as have been others in the past, about phase change media’s cyclability, which is limited to 1m writes where magneto-optical platters are claimed to have unlimited rewritability and the disks are claimed to last a century. IDC does not predict that phase change this year, at least, will make any major in roads largely because one of the biggest 3.5 optical disk markets is desktop publishing where big investments in magneto-optical technology have been made. These companies, IDC reckons, are not likely to change to any new format in the near future. But phase change could sweep through the personal computer market, damaging the current base. This is because it offers a cheap and fast storage system and its expansion will be aided by the proliferation of CD-ROM, the two technologies being easily integrated.
Numerous formats
Phase change offers up to 33% faster data transfer than magneto-optical technology. Because it is purely optical the head is simpler to make and so should be cheaper, although the laser has to be quite powerful and that could push up the costs. The first erasable phase change product to hit the UK market comes from Plasmon Data UK Ltd (CI No 2,577) and is a multifunction disk drive that can take a 5 erasable phase change cartridge, read CD-ROMs and play musical CDs, all for ú750. At that price it beats magneto-optical and hard disk storage and the product, the PD2000e licensed from Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co’s Corp, is compatible with most operating systems. It has been described as one of the most important storage products to be launched for years. But the problems of compatability and standards that have plagued magneto-optical storage, look set to strike phase change. By the end of this year Toshiba Corp will launch a double-sided 1.3Gb, 3.5 disk drive that will have a transfer rate of 16.4Mbps, compared with Plasmon’s 870Kbps. In 1997 both Philips Electronics NV and IBM, who have been working on phase change technology since the 1980s, will have products. Toshiba says it has 32 Japanese companies behind its work but not Matsushita. Matsushita has licensed its drive technology to NEC Corp and the medium to Toray Co Ltd in Japan and Plasmon Data in the UK. It recognises that for its technology to be a success there must be multiple vendors, and it plans to grant more licences by the end of the year. But like magneto-optical storage before it, phase change looks as if, to start with at least, it will come in numerous formats to confuse the market.
