DVD, the Goliath: Storage peripherals may not...

DVD, the Goliath: Storage peripherals may not be the sexiest of computer products, but they will be among the biggest stars of Comdex ’96.

Leading a pack of new storage technologies is the much-anticipated digital videodisc, or DVD, a kind of souped-up CD-ROM that will be used both for playing movies and storing multimedia computer data. Though the consumer electronics application of DVD as a replacement for the VCR has gotten most of the attention, it will probably catch on much faster as a computer storage medium.

DVDs hold about 10 times as much data as traditional CD-ROMs, and thus DVD is expected to dominate the segment within just a few years. Furthermore, initial shipments of writeable DVD drives that can both record and retrieve information are expected by the end of next year.

Still, with prices starting at $500 to $600 and an initial shortage of software products in the new format, analysts say it will take three years or so for DVD to make a big dent in the CD-ROM market.

In the last four years, CD-ROM shipments have exploded from 2.5 million drives to an estimated 54.5 million, according to Bob Katzive, an industry analyst at Disk/Trends Inc., a research company based in Mountain View, Calif. The business should get another boost this year with the introduction of recordable CD-ROM recorders from Philips and others that will start as low as $400.

Another important advance this year is the new wave of removable disk drives that put the venerable floppy disk to shame. A number of these products, priced in the $150 range and holding 120 megabytes of data--100 times more than a floppy drive--will be introduced at Comdex.

They’ll be especially useful for notebook computers and are produced mostly by Japanese manufacturers, though Utah-based Iomega Corp. and OR Technology of Campbell, Calif., are also in the hunt.

The traditional hard-disk-drive vendors are hardly standing still, either. Seagate Technology Inc. just took the wraps off the world’s fastest drive, a 9.1-gigabyte monster that spins at an unheard-of rate of 10,000 revolutions per minute.

Ironically, all these advances come just at the time when the disk drive industry is consolidating dramatically, with some large players--notably Hewlett-Packard Co.--pulling out of the business altogether. Analysts say the investment and attention required to keep pace in this fiercely competitive arena just aren’t worthwhile for some of the big, diversified concerns.