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Startup Cornice readies 1-inch hard drive
By Rick Merritt, EE Times
May 27, 2003 (10:39 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030523S0046

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A startup is close to announcing a 1-inch hard-disk drive that could offer 50 percent greater capacity than IBM Corp.'s Microdrive at less than half the cost.

Cornice Inc. (Longmont, Colo.) said its 1.5-Gbyte internal drive, aimed at the next generation of digital portable consumer gadgets, could sell for as little as $70. The drive is already generating some buzz for a ground-up redesign of the hard disk that focuses on low power consumption as well as cost.

But analysts noted that other 1-inch drive startups have not been able to overcome financial and technical difficulties and that a broad market for the drives has failed to emerge.

With just four chips--three of them from Texas Instruments Inc.--and a handful of discretes, the Cornice drive is said to use fewer components than the current, 1-Gbyte IBM Microdrive. Cornice is said to have a road map that gets the drive down to three and then two chips.

The drive does not use a conventional interface but instead links directly to a host processor and is designed as an embedded drive. It was reportedly used in several prototype products shown at CES in January, including the Digital Gadget, a multifunction camera developed by Samsung Electronics.

The new drive comes as other startups with 1-inch drives struggle to survive.

Marqlin Corp. (San Jose) is trying to find a new set of financial backers after having lost its initial investors. The company has given up hopes of launching its initial product, a 2.5-Gbyte drive using the CompactFlash interface, and is now designing a second-generation product as its market entry. "We ran into some funding problems. This is one of the tightest funding environments I have seen," said Gilbert Springer, chief executive of Marqlin.

Another 1-inch drive startup, GS Microdrive Inc. (Guizhou, China), has launched the 2.4-Gbyte MagicStor 1-inch drive in a CompactFlash II format. However, the drive has had poor feedback from reviewers, who said it draws too much current and can be unreliable at times. "The 1-inch drive market thus far has totaled "a few hundred thousand drives, not the millions that were promised," said veteran drive analyst Jim Porter of Disk/Trend (Mountain View, Calif.). The industry is awaiting the arrival of "shirt-pocket computers with voice recognition--the grandsons of the Palm"--as the app that could see the drives take off, he said.

Most IBM Microdrives have wound up in professional-grade digital cameras that sell for more than $2,000, Porter said. The company plans to follow up its 1-Gbyte model, which sells for slightly more than $200, with a 4-Gbyte model later this year, Porter added.

"I don't think these systems will find a huge business in the next year or two," he said.