IBM will begin shipping two new drives that use its breakthrough Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) heads technology next month. The Deskstar 16GP will have a storage capacity of between 3.2 gigabytes and 16.8 gigabytes, and the second drive &£45;- the Deskstar 14GXP &£45;- will provide up to 14.4 gigabytes of storage. PCs with the new drives will be available in early 1998.

The company eventually plans to make the GMR technology available in devices ranging from notebooks to IBM subsystems. "There is no reason why we wouldn't incorporate these advances into other systems," says an IBM VP. "This announcement is aimed at the desktop arena, but the entire family of hard disk drives will be incorporated into other products."

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