History (1997): Samsung Being First MR Head Customer of IBM

IBM SSD has found its first customer for MR heads in the Korean firm Samsung, and expects to start shipping more than one million heads this quarter and several additional million by the end of 1997, to be integrated into desktop hard disk drives.

Until now, Samsung was a major customer of Silmag’s for planar heads.

Nine months ago, IBM had declared its intention to sell these strategic components, capitalizing on a $1.3 million investment, a third of which was to support its own OEM MR head business.

Until now, IBM has shipped more than 200 million MR heads in its own disk drives.

According to Bob Holleran, IBM SSD’s business line manager, technology operations, in charge of introducing MR heads, the Samsung contract is a multimillion dollar deal that covers one year.

The current market price of MR heads varies from $10 to $ 12.

Samsung will take shipment on HGAs (Head Gimbal Assemblies) from China, built around heads on wafers that are produced in Mainz, Germany and San Jose, CA.

Holleran expects that IBM’s next generation of GMR heads, which arrive next year, will also be placed on the merchant market. However, as far as magnetic platters are concerned (IBM recently announced that it was setting up the world’s largest plant in San Jose}, Holleran wouldn’t say whether Big Blue intended some of their output for an external market.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 112, published on May 1997.

Note: Samsung sold its HDD business to Seagate in 2011 for $1,375 million.