Storage firms strive to meet broadband mobile demands

Data storage companies are racing to provide portable device vendors the drives they will need to cope with high-speed data services.

With the first broadband mobile data services possibly less than two years away, tie data storage industry is rushing to set standards for micro-sized, micro-powered mass storage for portable appliances.

And while the telecoms industry may be uncertain about the applications likely to evolve to exploit the 2-megabit-per-second transmission set to become available under third-generation mobile, the computer industry is doing its best to ensure they will not be hamstrung by memory and storage constraints.

Although memory and storage is hardly an issue for handset makers at present--the average GSM handset requires barely 1 megabyte of memory and virtually no nonvolatile data storage at all-storage technology companies are speculating that these requirements may jump dramatically. This summer, for instance, IBM corp. expects to bring the world's smallest magnetic hard drive to market, hot on the heels of an equally impressive device from Calluna plc, of Glenrothes, Scotland.

The IBM Microdrive, which will cram up to 340 megabytes into a 42.8 x 36.4 x 5.0 millimeter form, is the first magnetic storage device to support the compact Flash Type II standard, a peripheral format specification largely driven by manufacturers of digital cameras. According to IBM, the Microdrive's compact size, and its thrifty 3.3 volt power requirement, make it suitable for use in a pocket-sized organizer device, such as PalmPilot or Psion V, vastly enlarging the data-carrying capacity of such devices at a fraction of the cost of installing a similar capacity of solid-state storage.

But before Microdrive comes to market, calluna expects to have its second PC card format device available, offering equipment manufacturers an 85.6 x 54.0 x 5.0 millimeter, 260-megabyte device, which will also require only 3.3 volts. Although bigger than the IBM device, and intended primarily for the PC notebook and sub-notebook manufacturing sector, the calluna device should set a new price-per-megabyte standard for compact storage devices.

According to David Ruxton, calluna's director of product marketing, "Its suggested retail price should be $299, which is just $1.15 per megabyte." This figure should be lower for OEMs, said Ruxton, and could be pushed even lower if mobile personal digital assistant (PDA) makers can be persuaded to take the company's slightly thicker twin-disk PC card Type III device (85.6 x 54.0 x 10.5 millimeter), which offers 520 megabytes at approximately $0.49 per megabyte retail.

At the moment, said Richard Gordon, a senior semiconductor market analyst with Dataquest Europe, of Egham, England, the average price of solid state Flash memory for telephone handsets is $2 per megabyte, which could make calluna's device an attractive option for handset and PDA makers as they look for extra capacity.

But Gordon warned that price competitiveness may not be enough to encourage handset makers to build in such magnetic storage. Issues of power consumption and size still have to be resolved. "The handset manufacturers have successfully driven power requirements down from 5 volts to 3 volts, and these days to 1.8. Before long they will be down below I volt, and they will be reluctant to come back up," he said.

Per Stein, L.M. Ericsson's business development manager for wireless data products, agreed that 3.3 volts is probably too much for handset makers to consider. Although Stein believes 3G networks will spawn a new generation of handsets focused more on functionality and performance," he said Ericsson will be very reluctant to compromise on handset battery life, and on size. "I may want a new kind of device, but I don't want to [have to] buy a new suit," he said.

Calluna's Ruxton conceded that this year's micro devices may be more suitable for handheld computers rather than phones, but he claimed that within 12 months their power budget could be cut to 1.8 volts and "made to make very few significant demands on battery life," he said.

But according to Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing research with the Gartner Group, of San Jose, California, formats such as PC card and compact Flash are not suitable for use in mobile handsets. "If you made a phone with a compact Flash device I would say that it would fail, because it's too big," he said.

Instead, he said mobile handset makers must break with their traditionally proprietary technology development efforts. At the moment, said Dulaney, "the handset makers are like a bunch of chickens running round with their heads cut off. They need to sit down and work out some standards."

COPYRIGHT 1999 EMAP Media Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group