CAISS Dinner Seminar

 

Date:                      May 4th, 2005

Registration:          6:30 – 7:00 PM

Dinner:                   7:00 – 8:00 PM

Seminar:                8:00 – 9:00 PM

Place:                    China Stix Restaurant, 2110 El Camino Real, Santa Clara,  (408) 244-1684

 

Title:  The future of small form factor hard disk drives

Speaker:  Thomas Su, CEO and President of Riospring

 

Abstract:

 

The small form factor (SFF, 1.8” and below) HDDs have gained much notoriety last year due to the fabulous success with Apple’s iPOD and mini iPOD.  These mini HDDs have proven to be a high capacity and performance, cost effective, power efficient and reliable solution suitable for various consumer electronic (CE) applications such as MP 3 player, digital cameras, thumb drives, portable media players, Etc.   It is expected that mini HDD will soon penetrate into enormous and lucrative cell phone market.   The recent survey of China CE market will be reviewed.  The rapid advancement in HDD aerial density technology along with much lower unit cost has enabled many more storage hungry CE applications.  At the same time, flash memory has accelerated its capacity density curve with very aggressive pricing.  The bottom of low density flash memory pricing has fallen off recently.  Though the targeted CE market for SFF HDD is forecasted to grow more than 50% annually for next 5 years, the competition for the market share will be fierce.  Will SFF HDD stay competitive or better flourish in the future?  What challenges do drive and HDD component companies need to overcome to fend off its territory?

 

About speaker:

 

Thomas Su is the president/CEO of Riospring Inc. in California, USA.  Riospring is an R&D company specializes in small form factor hard disk drive technology and product development.  Thomas also holds the position of EVP/CTO at GS Magicstor (1” drives), GS Magicdrive (1.8” drives) and GS National HDD Research Center.  All GS are hard disk drive R&D/ manufacturing/ sales&marketing companies located in Guiyang City, Guizhou Province, China.    

Prior to his tenure at Riospring, Thomas held founder/President/CEO position at Microstor Inc., founder/Vice President of Engineering at Castlewood System Inc and had held various senior technical and management positions in 20 years of data storage industry.  He has proven track record of taking products from innovative design conception to timely delivery of offshore mass production.   Thomas received his BSEE from University of Washington and MSEE from San Jose State University.