Disk Drives

New generations of high-capacity diskette drives are on the horizon, including optical diskettes, magnetic floppy disks and hybrids called "floptical" drives.A number of companies, including International Business Machines Corp., are testing a 3.5-inch internal diskette drive that can read and write 2.88 megabytes of data on a single diskette -- twice the capacity of the current standard and eight times the capacity of the drive used in the original IBM PC.The only computer to use such a drive currently is a Unix-based work station made by Next Inc.Although the 2.88MB drives were working well in tests at the annual Comdex/Fall trade show in Las Vegas earlier this month, it may a year or two before they become adopted widely.

I put a 3-inch floppy disk into my IBM, and when I pressed the button to get it out, the metal door on the disk stayed in the computer. I don't know how to go about getting it back out. Should I take the cabinet apart, or is there an easier way? If you look closely at the front of the drive you will find a tiny hole just below the slot where the disk goes in. If you straighten a paper clip and push the wire into that hole, it will trip the eject spring and free your floppy. Hopefully the problem was caused by that errant disk and the drive will work with others.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Digital Equipment Corp., which watched Silicon Valley's personal computer juggernaut crush its minicomputer business, now hopes it can best some of the valley's biggest companies in another battle: disk drives.The Maynard, Mass., company has announced four new disk drives as part of a plan to dominate the large-capacity high end of the market and compete head-on with emerging products from Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Seagate Technology Inc., Maxtor Inc., Conner Peripherals and Quantum Corp.

Not long ago, an outfit promoting a high-speed Internet data transfer service sent me a white, shrink-wrapped "brick" about the size of a carry-around Kleenex package. When I opened the plastic, the brick unfolded into an extra large T-shirt -- wrinkled, but otherwise intact. A note inside told me the shirt had been "compressed" under 50 tons of pressure, which intrigued me, so I did a little research in the bureau drawer where I keep my T-shirts. I found that by using my standard laundry compression method, which consists of squashing everything down, I could fit 15 T-shirts in the drawer.

SINGAPORE -- Automobiles with video map screens, copy machines that "remember" thousands of pages and "smart" homes that keep track of all your appliances are some of the new uses expected for disk drives, according to industry executives.The growth of the disk drive industry has moved very rapidly but has so far suffered from excessive dependence on a single customer -- the personal computer manufacturer.Over the next decade, however, manufacturers see several new markets for disk-drive storage devices as the demand for data spreads to other products.

A hard disk drive is never more than one second away from disaster. A power fluctuation, a computer virus, a faulty circuit, a corrupted file, a hard knock on the desk, a burglar, an infestation of gremlins -- any one of them can render your hard disk as useless as a stone, sending data into oblivion.Luckily, you have a current backup. You DO have a backup, don't you?Gulp.Backing up a hard disk is the process of copying all or some of its files onto another disk or tape. It does not help to copy files from one part of the hard disk to another part of the same hard disk.

LAGUNA HILLS, Calif. -- UniStor Corp. Chief Executive Michael Campbell sat at the bar of a local cantina last summer, watching the dramatic coup attempt in the former Soviet Union unfold before his eyes.For months, he had been laying groundwork with communist apparatchiks to build a disk-drive manufacturing plant in Volgograd, Russia. But now foreign television correspondents were telling him that Mikhail Gorbachev had been overthrown and all bets were off."I thought for sure the deal was dead," Mr. Campbell said.

When my wife and I moved into our first house, we wondered how we would ever fill up all the closets.Of course, we were young and and foolish and didn't understand the First Law of Storage. That rule, expressed mathematically, states that the amount of stuff you have will expand geometrically to fill the space available for it.It's the same with disk drives. No matter how big a disk drive you put in a computer, you'll find a way to fill it up.This is why the Plus Development Corp. became an overnight success a few years ago with its HardCard line of add-on disk drives that fit into a single expansion slot of an IBM-compatible computer.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Almost everyone who owns a personal computer has heard this ominous warning. Make no mistake about it. Your hard-disk drive eventually will fail.And, of course, this disaster will strike at the worst possible moment.When it happens in Silicon Valley, home of the world's largest disk-drive makers, chances are that the damaged goods will end up with Steve Burgess.Faced with a customer who has a dead disk drive, a computer dealer will rarely fix such specialized equipment.

Harold Kohn,85, an attorney who filed some of the earliest class action lawsuits accusing corporations of price fixing, died Monday in Philadelphia. In the 1960s, Mr. Kohn became nationally known by winning a key case against General Electric, Westinghouse and two dozen other companies that the federal government had accused of illegal price fixing.Frank Sordello,62, an engineer who held 44 high-tech patents, including one for a component used in virtually all computer disk drives, died in Los Gatos, Calif.

Before you spend any money on software, you should check the Internet for a free program or Web site that will do the same job. I've believed that for a while, and it gets more sensible every day. What has caught me off guard, though, is that this rule is reaching out toward computer hardware. For example, you may not need as much hard drive space in your computer now that you can get free disk space through the Internet. Just last week, the i-drive.com company (www.idrive.com) announced "infinite" free space on its disk drives.

Did you hear the one about the stressed-out fellow who rang tech support looking for the "Any" key because his computer ordered him to "Hit any key?" How about the seamstress who set up her new PC with the mouse under the desk because she thought it was a foot pedal? Or the caffeine addict who called to complain that his cup holder was broken. You know, the one that slides out of your computer-- If these sound like urban legends of the Digital Age, spend an evening with James Copeland, an 18-year-old tech support staffer at Absolute Quality Inc. in Hunt Valley.

Harold Kohn,85, an attorney who filed some of the earliest class action lawsuits accusing corporations of price fixing, died Monday in Philadelphia. In the 1960s, Mr. Kohn became nationally known by winning a key case against General Electric, Westinghouse and two dozen other companies that the federal government had accused of illegal price fixing.Frank Sordello,62, an engineer who held 44 high-tech patents, including one for a component used in virtually all computer disk drives, died in Los Gatos, Calif.

International Business Machines Corp. plans to announce today that it has developed an ultra-small, 1-inch disk drive aimed at the explosively growing market for hand-held computers and consumer appliances such as digital cameras and digital cellular telephones.The drive, which will not be available commercially until mid-1999, is particularly striking because it is intended to fit into the same flash memory chip slots that are now standard in digital cameras and other consumer devices.The new drive will store about 5 billion bits of information a square inch, weigh about half as much as a golf ball and store as much as 340 megabytes of information -- the equivalent of about 300 hefty novels.

WHEN MY WIFE and I moved into our first house 22 years ago, I couldn't imagine how we'd ever fill up all the closets. When we moved to a bigger home, 10 years and two kids later, we had to build new closets to hold the stuff that was overflowing from the old ones.People who bought their computers a couple of years ago are starting to have the same experience.That's because disk drives are like closets. No matter how big they seem when you buy them, you'll manage to fill them up soon enough.

IBM plans to announce today that it has broken the magnetic disk-drive storage barrier of 10 billion bits of data per square inch. The company said the new technology would first appear in products in 2001.IBM passed the 1 billion bit level in April 1996. Like that advance, the new technology will first be used in 2.5-inch, nonremovable disk drives intended for use in portable computers. At this size, a single-platter disk drive will be able to hold 6.5 gigabytes of data, enabling very slim laptop computers to have vast storage capacity.

How will Tylenol react with tetracycline? Will erythromycin negate the effects of birth-control pills?Starting Thursday, countians will be able to get up-to-date information on these and other referencequestions as the Carroll County Public Library installs a new compact disk/local area network computer at this branch.The network of eight disk drives and four work stations, combining personal computer and compact disk technology, stores 150,000 pagesof text on one disk, said Ann Wisner, county library public relations director.

Kendall Square gets boost from ArmyA $5 million order from the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen helped to put Kendall Square Research Corp. in the black in its first quarter.Kendall Square, based in Waltham, Mass., makes "massively parallel" supercomputers. It can harness up to 1,088 processors to tackle stubborn problems.In Aberdeen, the system will handle scientific computing for Army, Navy and Air Force researchers across the country. Typical applications: designing ships and planes or developing new kinds of armor and weapons, says laboratory spokeswoman Denice Brown.

Judging by the calls I've been getting, a lot of people driving computers they bought three or four years ago are discovering the limitations of their hardware.The 80- and 120-megabyte hard drives that seemed so copious at the time are now overflowing. With games eating up hard disk space at 10 to 20 megabytes a clip, installing a new piece of software often means deleting something else -- if you can get the new programs to run at all in the two or four megabytes of memory that came with the computer.

Kendall Square gets boost from ArmyA $5 million order from the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen helped to put Kendall Square Research Corp. in the black in its first quarter.Kendall Square, based in Waltham, Mass., makes "massively parallel" supercomputers. It can harness up to 1,088 processors to tackle stubborn problems.In Aberdeen, the system will handle scientific computing for Army, Navy and Air Force researchers across the country. Typical applications: designing ships and planes or developing new kinds of armor and weapons, says laboratory spokeswoman Denice Brown.