"Hitachi is planning to double production of hard-disk drives at its plant in Prachinburi, Thailand, the company has announced. ... Production of the company's 4GB capacity 1-inch Microdrive disk drives, which are found in digital music players such as Apple Computer's iPod Mini, will see the largest increase in percentage terms, said John Osterhout, director of marketing for Microdrive at HGST," according to IDG News Service.
"We are seeing very strong demand for 1-inch drives," he said. "They take up a small percentage of the factory today but we will be expanding capacity from 200,000 units per month in the first quarter (of this year) to several million in the fourth quarter of this year so it's a very rapid expansion in capacity. Fuelling the very strong growth is demand from customers who are building these drives into small MP3 players."
Comment: The Microdrive format was originally developed by IBM, which sold its loss-making hard disk operations to Hitachi. It has no connection with the antique Sinclair "floppy tape" format used in the QL and ICL One Per Desk.
