What’s in store in the IBM big disk drive world? We gave you the views of International Data Corp yesterday (CI No 1,044), but the acknowledged guru of the disk drive world is Jim Porter with his Disk/Trend outfit in Mountain View, and Jim is looking for two completely new high-end disk subsystems next year: first up, he sees a 10.25 platter drive for the first half of the year that will spin perhaps 50% faster than the 3,600 revolutions per minute of the present 3380s – perhaps including multiple heads, but perhaps not storing much more than 1Gb, designed primarily for transaction applications where fast access and transfer are crucial, to be followed in the second half of next year by those mix’n’match 5.25 form factor drives that are expected to be the true successors to the 3380s, where IBM puts as many drives as it needs for a particular capacity and price point into the cabinet; these, two are expected to spin at 6,000rpm and will substantially improve IBM’s cost-per-megabyte – and have the great virtue for IBM that platters and drives that don’t cut it for the top-performance end of the market can be handed down to the mid-range people to be used in slower, lower-capacity subsystems.
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