History (1993): Seagate With Corning Glass-Ceramic Platters

Seagate Technology (Scotts Valley, CA) has reached a multi-million dollar non exclusive agreement with glass maker Corning Incorporated through which Corning will manufacture and supply new disk substrate products for Seagate’s HDDs.

The MemCor brand substrate developed in Corning research laboratories is made from a new, proprietary glass-ceramic material which provides increased capacity, up to 50%. It has crystals embedded throughout the glass.

Corning developed MemCor products for the computer industry after 6 years of R&D.

The new glass-ceramic material allows for lower recording head fly height, resulting in higher areal density designs. For the mobile computing market, the new glass-ceramic material will provide the capability to design higher shock-tolerant disk drives.

Shipments from Corning to Seagate began early this year. Seagate will begin volume production of drives incorporating MemCor disks in 3Q93 for a 2.5-inch unit, then for 3.5 and 1.8-inch HDDs.

Seagate drives with ceramic platters will use conventional inductive thin-film heads, then MR heads.

It’s not the first time that HDDs don’t use standard aluminum platters. Some small drives from Toshiba, Areal Technology, Maxtor or Hewlett-Packard have glass platters.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 64, published on May 1993.