Cringely on Foil Disk Technology
Robert X. Cringely (pen name) writes about Anil Nigam and Jim White, and their company, Antek Peripherals, Inc. which is developing a radically new disk drive optimized for low power and fast start-up times.
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… they could design new families of disk drives that held up to three times as much data in the same space, were more reliable, actually cheaper to build, and used 70-95 percent less energy to run than the current state of the art.
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Who needs flash in general as a mass storage technology? Our 10-gigabyte 0.85-inch drive can spin up, read or write data, then shut down again, all in less time than it takes to perform the same task using flash while being just as resistant to shock damage and more resistant to heat. That 10-gig drive will cost $24 compared to $240 for 10 gigs of flash, so we expect that our technology will be used for any application requiring more than 2-gigs of storage. The obvious market here is mobile phones, which will become media storage devices.
The market potential is one billion computer disk drives and one billion mobile phone drives per year. And it all starts around this time next year when metal foil drives will begin to appear under well-known brand names.