Thanks for the replies guys and Eric for the IBM part number info. I'm not building 20K/mth, my clients are. The phone calls are cheap, the baggage that comes with it are not. Some will drive you nuts insisting on sticking a microscope up your butt and others won't give you the time of day if you're not part of the big boys' league. The HDD business has moved to Malaysia and Thailand. One of the first few questions i get asked is "Where will this product be assembled?" Name a region out of their designated territory and you can hear a Whoopie cushion deflating. So getting budgetary prices off websites, (way to go TI, National) and scanning product news releases give a good ballpark figure before designing in a component. I don't even bother with ST, Lucent or Broadcom (try getting a datasheet from this one), unless they've got a chip nobody else has. So what i know is Seagate's using their own chips, IBM OEM's from Hitachi, Philips seem to be discontinuing their HDD motor controllers and Lucent's got a new 20,000 RPM chip at over US$4. Anybody got any more leads for me to look into? Cheers Terry Heng T3DESIGN Innovative Product Development Thinking out of the box At 11:20 AM 6/7/01 -0400, you wrote: >At 01:52 PM 6/7/01 +0100, you wrote: > >>..if you're building 20K/mth surely you can afford a few phone >>calls....? The net is not the only information source! > >The calls would be local in his case, he is in Singapore- the >centre of world-wide HDD manufacturing. This is a serious issue >with some parts, the manufacturers simply don't promote them >outside Asia, they know that few people in, say, Canada or the >US are going to be manufacturing consumer electronics. >OTOH, some of us *design* things to be made over there- but >the manufacturer's sales offices will disavow any knowledge >of the components, and won't go to any great lengths to help >because their internal system rewards them based on the >geographical area of the sales. When I do a design for a >client in Hong Kong, which is slapped together in Shenzhnen, >the local sales droids don't get a pat on the back (or >their palms crossed with silver). > >Best regards, > > > > >=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= >Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" >speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com >Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com >Contributions invited->The AVR-gcc FAQ is at: http://www.bluecollarlinux.com >=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > >-- >http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics >(like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics > > > -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.