Speeds and Feeds

Looks like I'm up and running...

Well, I got some quick training on CNET's blogging software, so I'm ready to get going with this thing.

First, my thanks to CNET's Michael Kanellos for inviting me to join this site. I've known Michael a long time, and it's always a pleasure to work with him.

I'd also like to expand a little on the short bio that appears on the main

I'm the VP of System Architecture at Montalvo Systems, a startup here in Silicon Valley. I can't say much about Montalvo yet; we're still in stealth mode.

Taking bets on the future standard for hard drives

Patterned media and heat assisted. Those are fightin' words in the hard drive industry.

Patterned media technology, actively promoted by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, stores data in tiny bits laid down in a platter in an intricate pattern. The bits are separated by each other to prevent data corruption. By contrast, in heat assist drives, championed by Seagate Technologies, a bit gets heated to a few hundred degrees Celsius, gets imprinted with data, and then cools down. (We wrote an early story on the debate here.)

Both technologies will allow hard drives to store more data than they do now, more