HP matchbook drive fires integration: Alters development of storage devices?

Electronic News, June 15, 1992 by Jonathan Cassell

SAN FRANCISCO--With the unveiling last week of a matchbook-size drive, Hewlett-Packard Co. raised the level of integration to a new height and may also have changed the fundamental development process for compact storage devices.

The new "personal storage module," dubbed Kittyhawk, is the first known 1.3-inch drive and offers low power consumption to match. While its 21.4 MB capacity is too small for mainstream mobile computing applications, HP officials argued it should prove adequate for non-traditional applications, many of them not invented yet.

"The same way the development of the microprocessor led to technological advances, so too will this make possible a host of new technological applications," predicted Bruce Spenner, general manager of HP's disk memory division. Some of those new applications could include storage for cellular phones, devices for remote scientific and medical data collection, and a medium for distributing software for home video game systems, he said.

For HP, which leapfrogged the 1.8-inch form factor in introducing Kittyhawk, the new drive means more than a new form factor--it means a fundamentally different development and marketing process, some analysts observed.

"The Kittyhawk was not designed with PCs in mind," said Crawford Del Prete, an analyst with International Data Corp. "Other drives, like 2.5- and 1.8-inch drives, are designed with PCs in mind and then once the drive becomes cheaper through volume it migrates to other applications. It is my view that this is a fundamental change in the way drives are marketed, and it will be hard drives' first entree into traditionally non-drive applications," including several of those cited by HP.

HP initially plans to sell half its Kittyhawk production to outside OEMs but hopes over the long term to push that to 80 percent, said Jan Bell, marketing manager for HP's disk memory division. The most obvious candidate within HP itself is its popular 95LX palmtop device, but HP would not confirm whether Kittyhawk will be used in future versions of that product.

The new drive, which was developed with an unusual degree of cooperation with subsystem vendors, weighs about an ounce and is 2 by 1.44 by 0.4 inches, or about the size of a kitchen matchbox. By contrast, MiniStor Peripheral Corp.'s 1.8-inch drive is an inch longer and half an inch wider. The Kittyhawk operates at 5V and consumes 1.5W for reads, 1.7W for writes, 2.8W for spinups and 15mW in sleep mode.

In order to prevent data loss from vibrations or drops, HP has developed a proprietary shock sensor that shuts the drive down before data loss. Claimed operating shock is 100Gs and non-operating shock 250Gs. Mean time between failures is claimed to be 300,000 hours.

Average seek time is 18ms, and sustained transfer rate is 0.9MBps. Glasssubstrate disks spin at 5,400rpm, for a latency time of 5.56ms. The drive comes in a dual-platter, 21.4MB version and the single-plater 14MB version. Buyers will have a choice of an At attachment or a PCMCIA Type III interface.

Among development partners who played a key role in bringing the drive to market was AT&T Microelectronics, which supplied an all CMOS mass-storage chip-set consisting of its Reach 2 read channel and servo channel devices, Search1 multiprocessor and Spin1 servo data converter. Because of the large number of functions packed into the chip-set, Kittyhawk employs only seven integrated circuits in all, compared with an average of 30 for other drives, HP contended.

Kittyhawk's thin-film heads proved to be the nanoslider units that Read-Rite Corp. had reported shipping to an unidentified customer early this year (EN, Jan. 13). The heads, about 13 percent of the mass of its two-year-old minislider heads, support 180MB per square inch. Signetics Co. provided an integrated circuit for controlling the drive's dc motor. Japan's Citizen Watch Co. Ltd. offered production expertise and will manufacture the drive for HP.

HP refused to identify OEM candidates, but one of the first may be AT&T itself. AT&T executives hinted that the drive could be used in products ranging from mobile phones to remote medical monitoring equipment. "AT&T plans to be a major player in this technology," said Curtis Crawford, vice president of AT&T Microelectronics.

HP hasn't ruled out mobile-computer applications, and a higher capacity version of the drive planned for next year could find a role in that sector, where its high shock resistance and optional PCMCIA connector would place it squarely in competition with 1.8-inch drives and flash memory devices.

With flash memory priced two and a half times as high as the $12 per megabyte for Kittyhawk, "Flash has no defense against this," said Jim Porter, president of consulting firm Disk/Trend. HP is shipping evaluation units at $450, with volume deliveries to begin in the fourth quarter at unit prices as low as $250.

Flash memory vendors such as SunDisk Corp. argued that the far greater ruggedness of their solid-state memory products would ensure that they are not displaced by smaller drives. "The bottom line is that a 100G or 200G shock is not important; 500G to 1,000G is," said SunDisk marketing manager Bob Leibowitz. "If a computer is going to be carried around, it's going to be dropped. It's important to able to survive a three- or four-foot drop onto concrete." SunDisk's devices can endure up to 500G of operating shock, he said.