IBM Debuting Smallest Disk Drive

International Business Machines Corp. will unveil the world’s smallest and lightest disk drive Wednesday--a potential boon to the digital camera market and other consumer electronics devices with increasing demands for data storage.

Weighing less than an AA battery, the drive could be used in car navigation systems to store maps and to pack addresses, schedules and phone numbers in handheld computers and could pose a threat to the most popular type of data storage now used in digital cameras, called flash memory.

The announcement is the latest in a string of disk drive technology breakthroughs from IBM’s Almaden Research center at the southern end of California’s Silicon Valley. In addition to disk drive advancements, the relational database--a powerful software tool to store, organize and sort data--came out of the research center.

“This should sell very well and it potentially revolutionizes the digital camera market,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst at Giga Information Group.

The drive can hold up to 340 megabytes of data, enough to hold about 340 200-page novels. The Microdrive also can store the equivalent of more than 200 floppy disks.

Analysts said the biggest hurdle facing digital cameras is the amount of data the flash memory chips hold. IBM, the No. 3 maker of disk drives, said the Microdrive would have lower storage costs than flash memory, now used in digital cameras.

The drive, which will be available in the middle of 1999, could also be a threat to companies such as SanDisk Corp., which makes memory modules based on flash technology, and Iomega Corp., a maker of removable data storage devices.