History (1999): Best and Worst in Storage in 1998

Here are the best and worst in storage during 1998:

• Smallest: IBM’s one-inch HDD drive
• Biggest: IBM’s 25GB IDE HDD and Seagate’s 50GB Barracuda
• Loudest: Iomega’s “Click of the Death”
• Quietest: the flash disk
• Fastest: Hitachi’s 12,030rpm Pegasus 2 HDD
• Slowest: evolution of the size of the DVD-RAM market
• Least surprising: HDDs continue to increase capacities by 60% yearly
• Most stunning: new magneto-optical technologies from TeraStor, and above all, Quinta
• Most obvious trend: too many tape technologies currently in existence, and too many on the way
• Most intriguing trend: there aren’t enough manufacturers for 2.5-inch HDDs, which is causing overinflated prices
• Most overworked 3 letters of the year: SAN most overworked 3 letters of all time
• IBM Most convincing answer: is FC an interface or a local network?
• Both least unanimous answer: who benefits most from SyQuest’s disappearance? Iomega, Castlewood, CD-RW drives, or no one
• Oldest question: what will replace the floppy? (Zip, SuperDisk, HiFD, Pro-FDline, CD-RW or nothing)
• Most unanswerable question: what is Finis Conner’s secret for producing HDDs more cheaply than the competition?
• Least dignified: the manner in which Al Shugart, 68, was dumped by Seagate
• Most watched: the manner in which Steve Luczo, only 41, will manage to follow such a tough act
• Best business plan: Maxtor’s which is a lot like Western Digital’s once was; Mike Cannon is our executive of the year
• Worst business plan: Western Digital’s which is not at all like Maxtor’s once was; Chuck Haggerty is not our executive of the year
• Biggest flops: JTS, Integral Peripherals, SyQuest
• Smallest splash: Maxtor going public
• What we mostly don’t know: if the best days of the HDD industry are now behind us; although more units were sold in 1998, total sales are down
• What we know even less: who will be the first HDD manufacturer to go bust, since apparently there are too many?
• Marriage of the year: Compaq and Digital
• Broken engagement of the year: Adaptec and Symbios Logic
• Biggest deal: $1.6 billion, the cost of Veritas’ acquisition of Seagate Software
• Raw deal: the acquisition of SyQuest for an undisclosed sum by an undisclosed buyer
• Our most shining hour: to be the first (worldwide?) to announce the new Conner Technology venture

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 132 on January 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.