Fujitsu was mentioned. You can also add Toshiba to the list. That is about it, unless you want to include ExcelStor, who make some of Hitachi's disks under licence. Maxtor will soon go the way of Connor (now ExcelStor) and Quantum (now Maxtor) after being subsumed within Seagate, and Hitachi is reportedly thinking of throwing in the towel.
Of course, once capacities for flash memory ramp up, the names will change again.
This is SOOOO, not worthy of front page news. Post something like that when it's acutally closer to reality, right now its just very experimental..."could", yeah so what. "could" be halographic storage by 2010, or 2012, or whatever the company hyping their supposed next technology wants to excite you about. Any of them have anything close to a shipping product? No way, dumb story.
Last year at this time (September) Samsung annouced a breakthrough in flash memory, saying that their new type of flash Charge Trap, was already in prototype form in 64GB 40nm process, which could lead to more reliable and less expensive flash ram (not to mention higher performance speed wise). With 128GB flash ram a possibility by the end of the next year...which is right now. Where is this 40nm Charge Trap flash memory??? They just started *shipping* the prior generation of older tech 50nm process 64GB flash memory.
Wake me up in 2015 when Hitachi or whoever puts out these drives. Seagate and Fujitsu have also previously announced, R&D tech, that could also get same amount of storage on the venerable HD. YAWN, it's it going to be on my next Apple computer next year or the year after that??? No?, then it's not even worthy of mention on front page news...not yet even close to production.
But by 2011-12, Samsung and others fully expect to have replaced the majority of HD's in laptops with SSD's, I suspect by then cost will be close to parity btw 500GB HD for laptops and 1.8in 256GB SSD's...probably be users choice as to which they order for their laptops. Say OSX 10.6 due out in 2011-12 (they way Apple is going, what new insanely great functions can then add before then?), and will take upwards of 100GB for everything on a full install, still leaves 100+ GB free space. Unless you'r working with massively large databases, scientific data, or 2K res HD video, want 10k iTunes songs on your laptop, lol, you don't need a 500GB laptop HD.
Someone post a rumor about 64GB SSD's for the next round of Apple laptops (Samsung, Alienware, Dell already have them in their laptops), that would be worthy front page news. 128GB SSD's with even higher performance, instant on/startup, even better...though I wouldn't expect to see those until at least the end of '08...someone post a rumor about those later this year
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Might as well start posting every single 5yrs out storage solution on front page news then...useless info if you ask me.
