Updated intelligence on IBM’s top-end disk drive plans suggests that the new higher capacity drives may not appear before the end of the year, but that a new 3880 controller that would support a 4.5Mbyte per second channel data rate might well appear as soon as the end of this month or very early next: IBM typically introduces the next generation controller ahead of the disks for which it is intended, and did exactly that with the original 3380; the new one is expected to support only the newer 3380E drives, and to be stuffed with cache – perhaps as much as 1Gb (IBM has to find new uses for those millions of 1Mbit memory chips it is churning out); forecasts of capacity on the new drives (which will not be offered as field-upgrades to any existing ones) have ranged from 7.5Gb to 10Gb, and current betting is at around 8Gb.
