Largest Buyer Read-Rite, IBM land orders for MR heads from WD By Terry Costlow, EE Times Irvine, Calif. - With Western Digital Corp. switching entirely to magnetoresistive heads, head makers were busy filling its orders last week. WD, the largest drive maker without a captive MR head supply, has tapped Read-Rite Corp. and IBM Storage Systems as leading suppliers, with Sanyo Corp. also providing heads. For Read-Rite (Milpitas, Calif.), the deal marks a major design win. Western Digital, one of the top suppliers in the all-important desktop-PC market, is by far the largest customer for MR heads. The company now sells MR heads to Maxtor Corp. and Micropolis Corp., which have fairly small market shares. Read-Rite also sells heads to Quantum Corp., which is augmenting the production of its internal head-making operation, acquired from Digital Equipment Corp. The heads used by WD are a step forward in capacity, storing 2.1 Gbytes on a 3.5-inch platter, substantially higher areal density than the 1.5-Mbyte capacity that is possible with other MR heads shipped by Read-Rite. The WD contract is also a major design win for IBM (San Jose, Calif.), which has made MR heads for internal use for most of the decade but which only recently started shipping heads externally. IBM completed its transition before most other drive makers had moved their MR programs beyond pilot products. IBM executives predict that MR shipments will be a major revenue source for the company. IBM is also leading in the development of next-generation MR heads. (Next article.) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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