At the cutting edge of the disk drive business, US companies increasingly pioneer the design, and then sign up with a Far Eastern major at the high-volume manufacturing stage Hewlett-Packard Co is teamed with Citizen Watch Co on its 1 Kittyhawk, Maxtor has Kubota Corp as partner on its Maxoptix optical disk business and now Hyundai Electronics Co on its entire business, Komag Inc is partnered with Asahi Glass Co. Now 1.8 drive pioneer MiniStor Peripherals Corp, San Jose has found itself a mighty partner in the shape of Hitachi Ltd, which wants a short cut into the PCMCIA Personal Computer Memory Card International Association interface small disk market. The two will collaborate on high-capacity 2.5 and 1.8 drives storing 500Mb and 120Mb respectively. MiniStor is not yet in 2.5 drives, and these will be developed with and manufactured by Hitachi, but both companies will market them. The company would not give Reuter full details of the five-year accord but said the deal was worth up to $10m: Hitachi gets rights to MiniStor technol ogy and providing funding for further research. Tar get in the 1.8 market is to do a disk storing 200Mb by the end of next year.
