IBM Prepares Pocket Disk Drive

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September 07, 1998 (4:29 AM EDT)

By Mark Hachman,

You know that jumble of change, car keys, and lint in your pocket? IBM's betting you'll keep your next marketing presentation in there, too.

That's because Big Blue (company profile) thinks 1999 will be the year of its smallest hard disk drive ever: the 1-inch "microdrive," which will be a 170- or 340-megabyte, 1-platter drive with a standard ATA interface, similar to the clik drive discussed by Iomega.

The microdrive will fit within the CompactFlash small form-factor storage footprint designed by SanDisk, and use either the CF direct interface or a PC Card adapter to connect to digital cameras, mobile PCs, and other portable devices.

Measuring 42.8-by-36.4-by-5 millimeters, the new 5,400-rotation-per-minute drive should ship in 1999. But the announcement, formally scheduled for next week, is a technology presentation only; IBM is busy persuading customers such as Canon, Minolta, and Hitachi PC to evaluate the products before samples ship in the first quarter of 1999.

By the same token, IBM is also trying to determine how much of its own manufacturing efforts to devote to what could be only a niche market. Initially, the drive components will be sourced almost entirely from within IBM, and assembled at its Prachinbiri, Thailand, facility.

The sub-2.5-inch drive market has not been favorable to drive makers, which, to date, has been dominated by a larger 1.8-inch disk drive that fits into a PC Card Type II or III slot. One supplier of 1.8-inch PC Card drives, MiniStor Peripherals, is out of business. Another, Boulder, Colo.-based Integral Peripherals, discontinued its 1.8-inch products, filed for bankruptcy, and sold its assets to Mobile Storage Technology on May 1 of this year, according to an MST spokeswoman. Only Scotland's Calluna Technology remains in the 1.8-inch market, analysts said.

"But to say the size of the market is directly related to the size of the drive would be unfair," said Jim Porter, president of Disk/Trend, in Mountain View, Calif. IBM will likely be competitive in terms of the power consumed by the disk drive, as well as sell for a small fraction of the cost per megabyte of flash-based storage, he said.

But IBM has every confidence it can succeed where others have failed. "IBM traditionally is very conservative in releasing products to market, and we have a strong track record in that regard," said David S. McIntyre, director of strategic marketing for IBM's Storage Systems Division, in San Jose, Calif.

Furthermore, IBM has traditionally been on the leading edge of technology introductions, analysts said. Because the drives are so small, only one disk platter will ever be used inside the drive.

That will force Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM to keep increasing the areal density, the number of bits per square inch on the disk drive platter, to increase capacity. Now, the microdrive's areal density is 3 gigabits per square inch, less than the 4 gigabits per sq. in. used on its 2.5-inch drives for notebooks.

"So you can see we have room to grow, even now," McIntyre said.

The drives, which will include IBM's Advanced Battery Life Extender technology, will consume less energy than flash chips or other non-volatile memory, he said, which need to expend power to erase the chips before writing. Magnetic hard disk drives do not.

The drives will also contain technology to "ruggedize" the drive, preventing the disk surface to be scratched by the disk drive's read head as it is jostled about. McIntyre said one of those technologies will be head "parking," which moves the disk away from the disk surface when not in use, like a record player.

However, McIntyre declined to disclose the estimated pricing and power consumption.