Stealthy Start-Up Delphi Memory Technologies Discovered

On the web site of Delphi Memory Technologies, Inc., there is only one page with the short following sentence: “Our team is hard at work in Sacramento, CA, building out the future of data storage. We cant wait to tell you more, but right now we are working very quietly.”

What do we find about Delphi Memory?

Jack Corrie is the president and board’s member since April 2014. He is also CTO and founding member of FuseIntel, with in specialized TDaaS technology that aggregates, correlates and displays information from disparate sources, in real time, to create actionable intelligence for crime prevention and detection.

Delphi Memory is designing, patenting and opts to deliver a new multi-actuator for HDD extending the life of the HDD and better than SSD. New HDD devices with multi-actuators are supposed to outperform current HDD with factors of 4-8x and are now tune able, fit in standard form factor, save energy, space and is supposed to catapult the HDD forward in a natural evolutionary manner.

We found also this following patent (10,090,017) assigned to the company about an apparatus and method for dynamic multiple actuator drive data access, abstract being: “An apparatus and method for dynamic multiple actuator drive data access includes: partitioning a data package of a received data transfer request into a plurality of data segments, assigning actuator drivers and actuator controllers, initiating a data transfer to or from the data storage medium using one or more of the plurality of actuators corresponding to the one or more assigned actuator controllers, storing or retrieving an individual data package of the data transfer request to or from the data storage medium wherein the entire data package is wholly accessible to a single actuator, if the data transfer request is a random data mode request, and storing or retrieving an individual data segment of the data transfer request to or from the data storage medium wherein the data package is accessible to the plurality of actuators, if the request is a parallel data mode request.”

The patent application was filed on March 8, 2015 (14/641,387) with the following picture:

Several companies entered since a long time in multi-actuator for HDD but it never was applied to a storage device. Seagate is the most recent one and revealed in 2017 a new multi-actuator technology, that can double the data performance of its future-generation of HDDs “in development to be deployed on products in the near future.”

Conner Peripherals, acquired in 1995 by Seagate, was probably the first to develop a drive, Chinook, with two separate actuators around the platters (US patent 5,223,993, November 3, 1989) but the firm produced a limited number of these devices.

In 1988, Aura Associates, another HDD maker, revealed a unit, Associates Fast 1, with four actuators.

Ten years later, Paradigm was seeking a buyer for the idea from Paul Gilovich: two arms per drive.

IBM also assigned a US patent 5761007 in 1998: “disk drive with multiple actuators on a single axis having different inertia characteristics.”

At the end there was no market for HDDs with several actuators up to now, a technology difficult to pack into a standard form factor, consuming more power, with more weight, and too expansive when price is a key factor for these products.