IBM is widely expected to announce a 7.5Mb version of the 3380 disk drive and versions of existing mod-els with faster seek times today, and enhancements on the 3800 controller are expected – but opinions differ sharply on how much of what it has in development IBM will announce. Support for 4.5Mbyte-per-second channels using a major new controller with 250Mb cache is a possibility, as is a quadruple den-sity 10Gb drive, but if these are announced they are not likely to be for delivery until the latter half of next year, which would tend to paralyse the market to IBM’s detriment in the interim. Also mention-ed is a fault-tolerant feature in the new controller that would enable two different strings to be up-dated concurrently to provide a shadow disk capability. Since IBM has been shipping the 3380Es for only a couple of years, some kind of upgrade capability is likely to avoid alienating large customers who have only recently installed them; substantial price cuts are also likely on existing 3880s and on the 3380E and D drives. And either today or later in the month, IBM is expected to give the 3090 more mid-life kickers, with the traditional autumn price cut, and possibly the facility to upgrade a 200E to the three-processor 300E.
