Meantime Ray AbuZayyad, general manager of IBM Corp’s Adstar storage arm, says that IBM expects to have RAID disk arrays ready for large systems sometime in early 1994, analysts that attended a meeting with the company told Reuter. The announcement is seen as good news for Storage Technology Corp, since it should give it a 12-month window with Iceberg: its shares rose $2.25 at $32 on Thursday last week. Jim Porter, whose Disk/Trend Inc company in Palo Alto, California is generally regarded as the repository for all the world’s wisdom about the disk industry, believes that IBM will have to offer a stop-gap in existing technology next year in the form of greatly improved versions of the 3390. These disks, using magneto-resistive heads, could hold up to nine times as much data per head-disk assembly as the current models. He sees drives with with double the linear density of the 3990-3s and more tracks to provide about 17Gb per head-disk assembly or more than 100Gb in what our US associate Technology News of America Inc thinks might be called the B9C; the 3390-B3C stores 34Gb. On arrays, Porter believes IBM has ditched its earlier plan to use 5.25 drives and instead is likely to draw from its growing range of 3.5 units, which includes the new 2Gb model (CI No 2,042). Porter spies a Wildcat series, with the first to be shipped shipped likely being Alicat, with planned capacity of about 3Gb, which could be formatted down to the 2.5Gb or 2.8Gb of the 3380-E or 3390-3 respectively. On basis of capacity, the implication is that the new 2Gb drive is not Alicat. Down the road, or alley, there will be more capacious models, units code-named Tomcat, possibly with 4.5Gb, and Fatcat, target 6Gb. The Wildcat drives will spin faster, have different actuator mechanisms and unique air filtration and cooling technology.
