The announcement is distressingly thin on technical detail, but Sony Corp reckons that it has found a way of making disk drives much cheaper to manufacture by using a plastic medium rather than glass or aluminium and permanently embossing an embedded servo into it. Seagate Technology Inc is so intrigued that it has done a deal with Sony under which it will help develop the technology to production and the two will jointly market Winchester drives using it. The medium is called Pre-Embossed Rigid Magnetic, and as well as making drives cheaper to manufacture, it is claimed to enable capacities to be increased and to simplify the manufacturing process – presumably as a result of that embedded servo.
