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5GB Hard Disk On A PCMCIA Type II Card
chopkins1 writes: "Toshiba has managed to squeeze 5GB of storage space into a PCMCIA Type II SAN disk. I'll take this over a Sony Memory Stick any day. Faster storage and faster copy to and from a computer. Considering that I'm about to get a camcorder that supports both, I think my decision is made (128M Memory Stick for $240US or Toshiba 5G for $400US), I'm going for the Type II card." As the article points out, that's more than typical DVD.
What does "SAN" mean in that context? I'm assuming the poster didn't mean Storage Area Network.
DVD R Drive - $700
DVD R disk - $25
total : $725. and it isnt portable.
This one blows it away.
The SAN disk is flash, without a rotating disk. See? Il est "sans disc"; Without a disk.
This is progress. The big question for me is, will it work in a Nikon professional digital SLR? (The Nikon D series has a PCMCIA slot but has 'issues' with the IBM micro drive and thus possibly with this one as well). And 5GB is almost enough. Yes, I'm not kidding: from a typical 2 month trip I come back with 50 rolls of film, or about ~1500 pix. Even assuming the instant feedback of digital allows me to avoid bracketing and taking redundant or spec shots, I'm still going to have about 1000 pictures. And lossy compression is not an option, so I'm still not going to be able to fit all of them on a single drive. But it's getting close. Of course other issues are still a problem: power draw and impact damage. My film camera typically needs one set of 4 Li AA's per trip; I suspect that using this thing in a digital camera is going to require multiple recharging stops per day (assuming I can find (a) and outlet and (b) a plug adaptor) or a lot of extra batteries. And while rolls of film have to be protected, I currently don't have to worry when my pack full of film gets thrown off the roof of a bus in Kyrgyzstan.
Consider real time video capture. This is NOT repeated writes/rewrites of the same data but a continuous filling of the disk. A big cache provides some buffer space while other parts of the cache are being flushed out to disk, meaning the drive continuously accepts data rather than pasuing constantly (as with a small cache) to write chunks of data.
excuse me,
but we're talking 5GB Microdrive which goes into your PCMCIA type II slot - you can have 3-4 hours of "movies" (call it what you want - but you have 320x240 resolution without anti aliasing etc...) - so they can be compressed quite easily with any codec... and that includes stereo sound..
Of course - the power required to operate those kind of driver continuosly will "milk" you battery right away - but thats another point..
Hetz (Heunique)
- A.P.
--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
As other posters have pointed out, the figure is closer to 750. What they haven't pointed out is that this is giga *BITS* not giga *BYTES*. So, at the maximum density, you're talking 750/8, or less than 100 gigabytes, which seems a lot more resonable
Just food for thought before you pitch a few on the old AmEx.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
> There are camcorders now out there that can do 1280x960 still images, but I don't think Sony makes one
n de x.jsp#Digital8
http://64.14.40.97:80/explore_products/producti
"Megapixel (1/4" 1,070k Pixels) CCD imager built in for high quality still images and MPEG Movie Mode to capture 60 second MPEG movie clips are two new features added to the DCR-TR730"
Ok, 1,070k is less than 1280x960, but it's more than 640x480. And if that MPEG clip can go to the Memory Stick interface (with "Memory Stick® PC Card Adapter" being listed as an optional accessory), something like this could be useful.
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rant
Whoops. Hit enter by accident on that last one
This sounds like the sort of thing we need for the ultimete PDAs of the future. Who cares about a 1GB hard drive when you can have a 5GB card that's *almost* as fast.
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Everyone seems to be talking about how nice one of these would fit in his iPAQ/Palm/whatever. The truth is, unfortunately, that harddrives sucks battery life really fast from handhelds, which makes them in reality unuseable. I tried an iPAQ with an IBM microdrive, and playing MP3s from it emptied a fully charged battery in about 10 minutes.
I thought stripping was a form of recovery, actually. Or at least watching stripping is. Now striping, on the other hand...
I hope you don't think the card slot on your camcorder is for recording video. Unless you're getting a new camcorder Sony hasn't announced yet, those Memory Stick and PC Card slots are both for storing still images. Lousy, low-res ones.
Even the $2500 Sony camcorders max out at 640x480 for stills, which look nice on a computer screen or a TV, but they won't make for anything bigger than a so-so 3"x5" print640x480 digital still cameas sell for $70 these days. And on a 128MB card or Memory Stick, you can fit about 1300 images at that resolution. Isn't that enough?
There are camcorders now out there that can do 1280x960 still images, but I don't think Sony makes one, and in any case, that's still bottom-of-the-line by digital still-camera standards these days. Remember: digital video cameras are terrible still cameras, and digital still cameras are terrible video cameras.
If you could dump video to the PC Card slot in the camcorder the 5GB drive would be nice for that. But you can't.
On the other hand, if you have one of those new Nikon D-1x or Kodak 760 3000x2000 resolution still cameras ($4000 or $7000, respectively, without a lens, flash or AC adaptor), something like this is good indeed, since the raw, lossless images take up about 18MB each. A 5GB card would hold a couple hundred such images, or a couple thousand minimal-loss JPEGs. That's pretty nice. A 5GB device would even be good for the "3 megapixel" 2000x1500 class of cameras, with plenty of room for a month or more of heavy shooting. But for the 640x480 images camcorders put out?
Caching in any computer system implies attempted reuse, of which there is none in such a system.
Without reuse, all you're doing is changing the maximum queue length in a G/G/1/L/M queuing system (remember those from your intro to queuing theory class that should be mandatory for any sort of technical media major?); it improves burst tolerance, but doesn't increase steady state throughput one bit.
Repeat after me: caching is not a panacea.
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This is a Type II PCMCIA card, and the PDA had a Type II CF slot. There are converters, but as it stands, the iPaq with PCMCIA sleeve is one of the few PDAs that can use this card.
I've been holding out on buying a hand held unit until I would be able to bring some pr0n with me on the road.
Thanks Toshiba!
:)Trolling is a art,
what rateing does this have ?
laptop drives have printed on them the pressures it can take and the amount of shock they can take
this is for when you take your laptop flying plus for DOD to know when they are building those flying machines they send around china
so does thig go well ?
my handheld could do with 5GB (-;
what would you use it for ?
(excludeing Jpeg and Mpeg(thats MP3's))
regards
john jones
Here you go, no blowing hands off neccessary.
Q.
In my Newton! :)
Just raise the taxes on crack.
I don't know whether too many other people besides Sony make flash video recorders, but I'm sure if they do, they don't use Sony's standard. I thought we were open technical standard promoters here. I'm not sure but the very fact that it's called "Sony memstick" doesn't make it sound open.
My point is compact flash and smartmedia is much, much cheaper than memstick. While that doesn't make it better than a pcmcia disk in video recording, only mentioning memstick does make flash sound worse than it is.
The prices of 128M compact flash and smartmedia flash ($70-80) have made me think a lot more about buying a flash mp3 player than a cd-mp3 player. And it uses batteries slower. And I'm kind of fetishist about small devices. And sure as daylight 256M parts will shortly become cheap too. Now if only someone would design an mp3 player which can ADDRESS a decent amount of flash. They seem to be limited in their maximum flash capacity, whereas the camera I bought 10 months ago can still take whatever huge size flash I put in it. Go figure, bad design. The mp3 player makers think they're selling flash, and not good mp3 players. Imbeciles.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
I can't figure out why Toshiba is bothering with Type II PCMCIA. A 5GB Type II CF card would be very cool, and would have some serious utility, but there just aren't that many devices that have full-size PC-Card slots that need removable online storage like this.
(I remember drives the size of washing machines... now something the size of a credit-card is considered "full-size.")
-Zandr
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
Okay... first, which sony flash video recorder are you referring to? Any Sony video camera I've seen uses tape. Yes, some have a memstick slot; it's used for taking stills with the video camera, or taking low-res low-rate video snapshots. Same goes for the still cameras that do video; the video is not meant to be high quality; it's for little 30 second, low-rate snapshots.
Now, is memstick expensive? Yes. Is that because its' proprietary? Yes. Does it have a technical advantge over CF or SM? No.
But you see, I bought a Sony Cybershot... and I bought a couple memsticks. Sure, CF would have been cheaper, by quite a bit. But that's all I need. There is no recurring cost for me, either way. It's not like I need some piece of flash, at this time, that fits in everythin I own; it's for storing pictures on. I don't go around buying more flash all the time, so I don't really care if it's more expensive.
On the topic of mp3 cd players.. I have an exonion.... avoid it at all costs. The mp3 playback quality STINKS. I don't know what's up.. but it beats the crap out of my tunes. Low-end filters, bass is missing (and I know it's there; this is on tracks that sound fantastic with winamp or whatever else I use on the computer). CD playback is okay, but it still pauses between tracks, which sucks.
Be very wary of which mp3 player you get.. many have shitty decoders.
My advice? Get an MD player...
Go get a HandEra 330 and you're ready to rock. Compact Flash, Secure Digital/MMC, and a bad-ass high-res screen. It is THE monochrome PalmOS device.
http://www.handera.com
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The the Genio that was just mentioned...
Beats the HELL out of my Palm III...
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
The DVR-A03 is currently $650 or so, $775 in a firewire config.
And DVD-R disks are $8.
gotta love www.pricewatch.com
Ok, I suck at math, so I may have some errors here, but your 848GB seems wrong to me. Even if the platter had magnetic material all the way across, it would end up being something like:
150(2(pi((1.8)/2)^2) i.e. 150GB/in2 * 2 (both sides of the platter) * (pi(r^2)) (the area of a circle). My answer gives something like 764GB. The fact is that a significant portion of the platter is not magnetic media. A more realistic area for a 1.8 inch disk is something like 2in2 as opposed to 2.5in2 (figure that the media is about 1/2in across) which means that they could probably scale this up to around 600GB per platter. Then again, if you scale this up to 4 platters like a modern notebook hard drive might have, then you end up with 2.4TB of data in your laptop. With this in mind, that 150GB/in2 limit doesn't really seem like that big of a deal.
its not a CPRM device. its an ATA66./ 5002mplspec.shtml
see the specs here : http://www.toshiba.com/taecdpd/techdocs/MK5002mpl
its also got a 3sec spin up time and consumes 1.5 W average power -- thats a bit hefty.
Just got a whole lot easier. ;)
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Here is the Toshiba page for the same item. It is also interesting to note (if you read the article), that they've had a 2G version of this card around for a year.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
There are converters, but as it stands, the iPaq with PCMCIA sleeve is one of the few PDAs that can use this card.
Count the HP Jornada 720 as one of those. The PC card slot was the main reason I bought it, since that allows it to be on my 802.11b network at home.
Thank you for posting that. It is nice to read another person who appreciates that participating in a capitalist economy is more than being a consumer. At the very least, one has an obligation to one's self to be a thoughtful consumer. Giving advantage to the producers in the economy by not pursuing one's own best interest is flushing money down the toilet.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
1) It seems a fall onto carpet from a desk would be a lot less than 3400Gs, esp as the microdrive is light, so the carpet will be "springy".
2) It's all cubes vs squares: the mass of the moving parts, and hence the force they exert under accelleration, varies with the cube of the size, while the cross section of the parts, and hence their rigidity, varies with the square. So every halving in feature size doubles the Gs it can withstand.
When you realize that this applies to the head going back and forth over the platter, it explains why drives got smaller (physically) before they got larger (capacity): smaller drives have better reliability.
The Psion Series 7 has a Type II PCMCIA slot
Well, you were pretty close...
Either way, it's a metric buttload of pr0n!
You appear to have calculated: 1.8*pi*150 ~=848.
Would the following be more accurate?
0.9*0.9*pi*150*2 ~=763
(area of a circle is pi*r^2, and both sides of the platter are in use)
Actually that's not quite true, the cache is good for keeping bursty writes smooth, however if you are pushing data to it as fast as it can write to disk then the buffer will become full and at that point it writes to disk at the same rate it receives data, the buffer just postpones that fact for a short period of time.
but FACE IT, who has a 20 gig drive in their laptop?
I do! As does the guy in the office next door, and the one down the hall, and the two upstairs, and Oh wait... The guy on the other side of the room has a 30GB drive in his.. 20GB drives for notebooks are pretty cheap, and the performance increase over a 1-2 year old 4-6 GB drive is phenomenal..
I really don't care if someone steals my laptop
Can i steal your laptop then? Please?
This is good news for iPaQ users :) Can't wait to get my hand on one of these, IBM is coming out with a 4 GIG Microdirve which will also be sweet but I don't know when!
Don't you mean RAID 10 (1+0)? RAID1 is slower, not faster.
I would love to use that, but given my experience with digital cameras I will stick with flash memory cards, 256 MB is not that bad and I have enough battery time to fill it.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
There are a few pictures of the card on this page.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
Toshiba's press release is here.
The 2G version of this hard drive is already for sale here. I'd imagine this 5G version will look just like it.
Yes, except that shock resistance decreases and power usage increases with density, which means that 848GByte disk would need to be shock isolated better than a high-end turntable, and need full-time AC power... which sort of defeats the purpose of it being PCMCIA, doesn't it? Also, what's the bandwidth of the PCMCIA slot? Doesn't it take about 10 DAYS to transfer 848GBytes of data through the PCMCIA bus?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I'd almost forgotten about Syquest. I still have one of those giant 44MB 5.25" cartridges around here somewhere...
-A.
What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
Every few months a new innovation in storage technology comes out and it seems to me that copyright infringment is getting easier every 6 months. Within a year or two, recordable dvd technology will probably be standardized (probably around DVD-R) and that will raise major issues for the copyright cartels and their congresscritters.
I remember seeing something to the effect that the global music industry is worth around $15B USD, but the American software industry alone is worth around $170B USD. Then you get into the American computer hardware industry's value to our economy and that will force those such as my congressman, Bob Goodlatte, into choosing to either deep 6 the American advantage over most of the world in the computer industry or to tell the copyright cartels to take a hike. Say what you will about the copy protection systems that the software industry uses, but at least it uses technology to solve its problem a hell of a lot more often than it uses government compared to the other copyright industries.
I think the overall intellectual property rights debate shows the difference between those that want an essentially truly free market and those that want a relatively free market, but always protect minor industries. I want much less protection for IP, not because I believe that bootlegging is right, but because IP law impedes progress when it is very strong and throws a monkey wrench into the free market. For example, ow many innovators have either been driven out of business by patent law, or just threw up their hands and quit because of the laws? We'll never know, just as we'll never know just how many kids we could have saved from drugs by dealing with drugs the way we deal with alcohol and tobacco products.
It is only innevitable that someone will make a dvd player for the average joe's home entertainment system that can play fully encrypted DVDs from a DVD-R. Some company like APEX will realize that the market for such a product could be astronomical if built up correctly. That is when we as Americans will have to decide between market capitalism and market socialism. If our courts protect APEX and either strike down the DMCA or limit it then that is a strong vote for capitalism. If not... then well it is time to stop bullshitting ourselves about being the "land of the free."
This would be so cool for laptops like the Sony PictureBook.
Of course, that would involve using DeCSS, so the MPAA wouldn't like it. With the DMCA, it would probably be illegal in the United States (although it sounds like "Fair Use" to me).
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I use a tiny USB-powerd hard drive made by Apricorn to backup my Laptop while on the road. I really don't care if someone steals my laptop beacuse I can cary the backup on my person. IBM Microdrives have been too expensive and not enoughf capacity, but this PC-Card size looks pretty good!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I carry The Matrix and Bladerunner around on my Microdrive with my IPAQ. After you compress it down for the screen size and the limit of playback speed they come out to around 2-300 meg a piece. So thats about 20 movies on one of these bad boys.
"If I can see farther it is because I am surrounded by dwarves." -- Murray Gell-Mann
I would like to slap one of these into an portable mp3, why not? Ever look at some of the memory chips used for these devices? Roughly the same size. Sure you couldn't take the mp3 player sky diving, but it would be good enough to jog to the store and back.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
If I may ask, what are some of the more common uses for Type II PC card hard disks?
"So in other words, don't drop it anywhere you wouldn't normally drop a regular hard drive."
With a device that is designed for mobility, I want a little bit better (although you can be sure that I'm pretty darn careful with my camera for the sake of the lenses if nothing else).
For me, I want it to be roughly as durable as my cell phone. Sure, I could break it if I tried hard enough, but it has held up fine to the usual assortment of mishaps that you can expect if you carry it with you at all times (falls to the pavement when I open the car door, dropped it on the kitchen floor when carrying too many groceries into the house in one trip, etc.)
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
I have a Casio digital camera and use a 340 Meg IBM Microdrive in it, and its great to have that kind of capacity. The problem has been reliability - I've already had to have it replaced under warranty once after only a few months of use under gentle conditions.
:-)
The article talks about carrying these new drives around "in a shirt pocket," but I'd like to see some data on reliability before spending too much money on one.
Having said that, I still want one
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Didn't IBM patent the concept of large hard drive space in small packages?
Toshiba is in deep shite now!
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
*WAIT don't mod this down because of the title PLEASE*
This is about the coolest thing I have heard of in a long time. the last was someone on #/. who was working on a way to interface the human brain with a computer dirrectly. That was cool. This card is awesome cause I can bring new life to my old laptop!! DUUUUDE, this is sweet.OK OK OK, I will shut up now.
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
Family Guy rules. IMHO, atleast on par with the Simpsons (and probably better). Who can resist a coke-sniffing dog and a guy in a wheelchair chasing down drug dealers?
By the way, in that episode your sig is from, did you notice the room Brian had at the rehab place? Room number 42. Hmm.....
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#nohup cat
Yes, the shows ability to find funny risque topics to exploit amazes me... Simpsons is a classic though... better no, but complimenting each other definitely.
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
Can this type II card be used as a boot device? It would make for some interesting OS swapping, while being able to keep the main filesystem mountable by most... err well 5GB I guess you dont really need the laptops internal HD for a filesystem do ya...
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
Go get a HandEra 330 and you're ready to rock.
No you're not, the HandEra has a CF slot, and no PCMCIA slot, and besides, what good is 5Gb of storage on a crummy palm?
The only real solution is a Compaq iPAQ with the PCMCIA sleeve.
how much shock can this take? They said it's single platter, and with the data being squished together so closely i wonder how they make it so it's safe from shocks, such as carrying in the bottom of a backpack
Actually, the speed seems in line with other laptop hard drives. Portable server, here I come! Now where did I put that USB DLT?
I've seen all these posts with people just itching to be the first to rain on the parade.
The simple fact is that it's a great advancement, and a usefull one. Sure, it may not be great for portable MP3 players or Video cameras, but I'd bet it will make those professional studio cameras a hell of a lot better when I'm doing a 2 hour photo shoot. In addition, it's a great tool for research as well. Being able to have small recording devices with 5 GB space allows scientists to set up much higher quality time-lapse and real-time remote data gathering equipment.
So stop trying to bash ol' timmy and do something constructive.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
UNLESS it has CPRM, in which case I will forget all about this. So which is it, Toshiba? Do you want to succeed or fail?
sulli
RTFJ.
I have a few thoughts on the Memory Stick, especially the MagicGate "technology"...
http://treklink.net/~overcode/copy-rant.txt
-John
That's more storage than my first laptop computer had and still plenty of storage to run Linux (even WinMe instead of WinCE) in a handheld device.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
OH DUH yes you're right ! Oh well, /me go back to school :)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
According to an article reported by Slashdot recently, the limit in storage density on a magnetic medium is 150Gb/in2. So with a 1.8in disk, this little PCMCIA hard-disk could contain a whopping 848Gb a few years from now !
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ack! The horror!
...in your back pocket.
You've gotta be insane if you carry a handheld in your back pocket! Sit on it and there goes your screen!
My only problem with the article is that it seems to use CompactFlash and TypeII interchangably, which just isn't the case.
/* ---- */
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7)
The reason that this marvel of technology was able to be created was due to the open standard for CompactFlash/Type II devices. Score another one for open standards!
Otherwise, that's some cool-ass technology. On my cruddy Kodak DC-120, I can squeeze about 50 pictures of reasonable quality onto a small 16mb flash card. Toss in an extra 5gb, and that amounts to oh...hrm...somewhere in the area of 15,000 still photos.
The implications for personal media devices are immediately apparent. mp3 players, next-generation camcorders (though I would still use miniDV just for time-recording length), and portable recorders are just three obvious applications.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
I wonder how suseptible it is to shock? If I drop it (or use it in a moving car hitting a pothole) will it still work? Will it introduce write errors? etc.
I bought a regular solid-state mp3 player instead of the nomad jukebox because I wanted to be able to drop it and it still work (oh, yeah, and the price too). Sure enough, I dropped it on my first outting. I scrached off a corner, but it still works fine.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
What happens if you shake it? How durable is it? Flash Memory, et al., has much less space but is solid state. Seems like on a platter, the closer together the bits are the easier is must be to damage the machinery necessary to access it. You don't worry so much about your laptop's hard drive because you don't remove it much and it's more massive, which means it has more inertia, making it harder to jostle. But I wouldn't dare carry a naked hard drive in my bag, let alone one of these itty bitty hard drives. Of course, IANA expert and could be completely wrong. Thoughts?
is putting a PCMCIA slot on your desktop to make 5G of data easily portable to your laptop.
Evil is the money of root.
RAID 5 is so ubersexy, but unfortunately, its also uber-expensive, especially when compared with IDE RAID 0/1 setups (for those of us who love redundancy, but don't need the speed of scsi and don't want to pay the money for large scsi drives).
So, unless I find a cheap RAID 5 solution, I'm going RAID 1.
Size doesn't matter, how you use it does.
You mean how you don't use it. I, on the other hand, have ~38 gigs and can run lots of apps, games, and store/edit videos and music. HD space is cheap! Use digital media for you pictures, videos and music!
Sure, 4GB used to work fine in 1996, before computers could be used as part of the entertainment center. But times have changed, you're holding back the potential of your computer if you don't get some disk space!
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
(for the benefit of those browsing above the AC's...)
Yeah, I got a 30GB drive several months ago for about $150, and prices have gone down since then. That's cheap. About 3 times as expensive as blank CDR's, megabyte for megabyte, but it is cheap.
But of course, I'm not the type to spout numbers without some kind of evidence. Check here, or if that's not big enough check here or here. Yeah, it's more than a few beers, but what were you expecting to pay for serious storage?
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
http://www.dynabook.com/pc/catalog/shuhen/mhdd/mhd 005.htm
Or see babel translated page.
That's largest than the hard drive of my laptop (4GB) but I still manage to run Win98, Win2K (with Office 2000), Debian and I still have 1 GB left. Size doesn't matter, how you use it does.
Nobox: Only simple products.
Excused.
but we're talking 5GB Microdrive which goes into your PCMCIA type II slot - you can have 3-4 hours of "movies" (call it what you want - but you have 320x240 resolution without anti aliasing etc...) - so they can be compressed quite easily with any codec... and that includes stereo sound..
I was talking about MiniDV and above quality video (as in attaching it to a video camera or something). If your talking about moviez then you could probably get 10 *ok-ish* movies or 5 pretty nice MPEG-1 VCD quality movies. (It just happens I have all the Star Wars movies in VCD... ;-)
Hmmm, will a Tivo ever have a PCMCIA socket....
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M0571y H@rml355.
Could be pretty cool for still images, digital cameras? But once it's full that's a lot of images to delete. (Unless ofcourse it's only got 10 really high quality images on it....)
It's pretty neat all the same, wonder when the 60G version is coming out.....
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M0571y H@rml355.
I burned up a calluna 540mb drive just through normal use a few months ago. It got incredibly hot just through normal use
The Toshiba Genio e550 series will be powered by a 206MHz StrongARM processor, 32MB ROM, 32MB RAM, and a 3.5
;)
Am I missing something here?
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
www.quantumheresy.com
Since the handheld they just released also has a Type II slot, you'll be able to buy one of each and carry 5GB of address book entries, email, and cheesy games in your back pocket.
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.
I am continually amazed by new technologies. First those tiny IBM drives, now this. However, someone needs to address battery issues: I bet this puppy sucks power from portable devices like you wouldn't believe. Pop one in and watch your battery life go right down the crapper. Not that it'd stop me from buying one, mind you...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Why couldn't they just use CF or SM? We need more solid state devices, but with new technology. What's the purpose of the propietary format of the flash RAM?
The competition will be good for IBM. IBM's drives are super neato. Too bad they don't work in most digital cameras.
I don't know what the differences are, but with my iPaq and my 128MB Sandisk CF card, I can play 64bit MP3s for at least 2 hours using the headphones. I know that without the headphones the thing drains in a hurry, so try attaching it to headphones or computer speakers.
501 Not Implemented
Now this is an intersting development and worth a look, my only questions (which the article doesnt mention) are simple.
How hot does it run (PC Card slots are notoriously cooling innefficient ?
How Noisy (maybe silent but worth asking) ?
How Reliable (MTBF Rating or similar) ?
How Robust (Shockproof) ?
What drivers are required (if the device is driver independant or self installing on Win then that makes it an ideal presentation storage device, simply plug in an off you go)?
I cant seem to find this info around the web - then again maybe im blind so if someone finds it can they post it ? this is the sort of info i would use before making a purchase - and this device is something i would use and at a low enought cost (us$400 UNIT is AU$800 (rough) but thats launch and for around AU400-500 this would serve a usefull purpose for road warriors).
COol piece of tech really - cant wait to see one
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
its possible if the machine is willing. depending on how old the laptops are though, they may not support that large a drive. before you rush out and buy one, ask yourself weather or not it is worth 400 bucks to buy a drive to fix a laptop that probably isn't worth that much.
I wan't my ultimate PDA to use electron spin proccessing, and have a cold fusion power source that will run it for a year off an ounce of water, and be able to comunicate wirelessly with every other device on the planet, not using slugish-high latency-satelite-stuff, and have a terabite harddrive, and ooh ooh it should be waterproof down to 1000M
As far as this device goes for being a major laptop device, i think they would benafit from making another model that bumped the storage up to a type 3 (two type 2s). Based on what i've seen of the architecture for the drive,the difference in casing would make it possible to dump 3 platters in there. I am aware of the microspacing and the drive heads and all the stuff that could be used as an example of a limiting factor, but FACE IT, who has a 20 gig drive in their laptop?, Have you ever dropped it? did it still work? how many heads did it have? how many platers?, what was the spacing? Precision manufacturing has gotten to the point where the drives would be pretty reliable.
Hey, i just realized, drive technology has changed A LOT! There was once a time when disk drives were the size of washing machines, and if you had a drive failure you had to be weary of shrapnal. Now, drive parts don't rip through your leg if your not careful, with the right technology, you get a friendly message that says you need to replace the drive, and it will be rebuilt without affecting the current operations. PS, the scaled analogy of drive platters and drive heads is a 747 flying an inch above the ground. Think of that...
This would be really useful if I could get a laptop to boot off it. I have a lot of old laptops with dead of dying hard drives. The hard drives are all old non-standard stuff, and replacements aren't available. However, if I could get them to use something like this, (they do have PCMCIA slots), it would be great.
Wow, can really see the practical applications of this now, especially in old laptops with non-standard hard drives. Is it bootable though, that's the question? And what about heat build-up? Unless they did something different, should be about able to melt the plastic casing on most laptops.......lot of good the 5 GB does you without a laptop in which to use it in......or without batteries? Should burn through those pretty quickly.......well, just have to get one and try i guess? Nice idea though, and not as clunky as those USB hard drives.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o