Hard Disk Maker Fights Flash

January 3, 2006: American hard-drive maker Cornice has stepped up competition with flash storage makers by announcing its new line of Dragon micro drives.

The company is gearing up to debut the new Dragon at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. It says that the new 8 and 10 gig micro hard drives are smaller in size, bigger in capacity and hardier than ever, allowing producers of consumer electronic devices to create sleeker and stronger phones, pda’s, mp3 players and portable storage devices with much bigger capacities.

Cornice claims that its technology has shrunk hard drive sizes by 40%, and dropped retail per gigabyte to US$18.50. This is significantly cheaper than the US$45 NAND flash sells for.

“We’ve learned that portable consumer storage markets not only require a very small and thin form-factor, but they also require low power storage solutions rugged enough to meet the stringent consumer usability requirements,” says Camillo Martino, Cornice chief executive officer.

Competition between hard-drive and flash memory makers has been hotting up as devices such as mp3 players have been taken up buy consumers en masse. Currently, flash memory has the size and speed advantage while hard disks have the edge on capacity.

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