Mr. Thomas Coughlin

President, Coughlin Associates

Member of the Technology Council

Council Member Biography

Tom Coughlin is the President of Coughlin Associates, Inc. He is an acknowledged authority on data storage products including storage devices, network attached storage, storage area networks, and storage applications. Dr. Coughlin has held senior engineering and management positions at companies such as Seagate, Maxtor, Micropolis, Syquest and Ampex. His responsibilities include technical evaluations, project management, market and technology reports, technical article writing, and conference organizing. He is also very involved in IDEMA, A senior member of IEEE and past chairman of SCV Magnetics and Consumer Electronics Society as well as past SCV Section Chairman. Dr. Coughlin has been publicity chair of the 1992, 1996, and 2001 TMRC conference and he is the organizer of the annual Storage Visions Conference. (This is me - Update Profile)

Employment History

2001 - Unspecified: President, Coughlin Associates

GLG News^SM Analyses by Thomas Coughlin(?)

Opinions and analyses expressed in GLG News are solely those of the author. See the Terms of Use for details.

Vast small hard drives fuel new consumer applications and smaller computers

November 8, 2009

Analysis of:Toshiba Introduces Two 1.8-Inch Hard Disk Drive Families for Both High Performance and Long Battery Life in Mobile Computing Applications | www.earthtimes.org

After its merger with Fujitsu, Toshiba is now the largest manufacturer of mobile hard disk drives (HDDs) (2.5 inch and 1.8 inch HDDs). Toshiba is also the largest manufacturer of 1.8-inch HDDs and the company has just introduced a HDD in this form factor with 320 GB storage capacity. This 2-disk 1.8-inch drive offers the highest storage capacity in such a small package and will enable more consumer and mobile computer applications

Optical disc drives being replaced by flash memory in computers?

November 4, 2009

Analysis of:PC makeover: slimmer profile, no DVD drive | www.mercurynews.com

Many PC makers are not including optical drives, especially for laptops and netbooks. Leaving out optical drives is being done not to reduce cost but to allow slimmer laptop and netbook computers. Flash memory with built in programs and entertainment content are now on the market in USB as well as memory card formats. Downloading content and applications has become more common, replacing one of the big uses for optical drives in computers. As flash memory $/GB declines and as write speeds for flash devices improve will these devices replace current optical disk physical distribution formats?

Rare earth metals ban by China could impact hard disk drive production

September 22, 2009

Analysis of:World faces hi-tech crunch as China eyes ban on rare metals exports | www.telegraph.co.uk

China has been the single largest supplier country for rare earth metals such as terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, lutetium, neodymium, europium, cerium and lanthanum. China is contemplating a ban of some of these metals and restrictions on supply on many others. Many vital technologies are dependent upon rare earth metals such as motors, hard disk drives, electronics and illumination. There are deposits of rare earth ores in the North America, South Africa, and Australia but it may take years to bring these online.

Dual Stage Actuator HDDs appear on SATA disk drives

September 21, 2009

Analysis of:Western Digital debuts 2 TB, 7200 RPM Caviar HDDs | www.techspot.com

Western Digital announced that their new 2 TB 7,200 RPM Caviar HDDs use dual actuators. Dual (actually dual-stage) actuators provide a coarser movement of the recording head to tracks using head arms moved by a conventional voice coil motor while a finer motion is provided using a piezoelectric actuator closer to the head. Dual stage actuators add some cost to the drive and increase servo control complexity but allow higher track density recording. Dual stage actuators had only appeared in some enterprise (high performance) HDDs from Seagate and other companies in that market to this point

High capacity hard disk drive components proliferate

September 21, 2009

Analysis of:SDK Starts Shipments of 2.5-inch 334 GB HDD Media | www.marketwatch.com

Showa Denko, the largest independent magnetic disk manufacturer, has started shipping 2.5-inch hard disks with 334 GB capacity. This disk formats are those used in laptop computers and smaller external hard disk drives (especially where power is off the same USB interface as the data transfer). The storage capacity areal density for these products is greater than 500 Gbpsi, a new record.

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GLG Study Groups with Thomas Coughlin(?)

Study Group Name	No. Members
TMT Council Members in Member Programs	16437
Technology Council Members in Member Programs	8640
Semiconductor & Component Experts	676
Semiconductor Experts	576
Semiconductor Experts (North America)	460