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1.8 Inch Removable Hard Drives Coming
bedessen writes "According to an article at PCWorld.com, a new type of removable storage known as iVDR will be demonstrated at January's Consumer Electronics Show. The iVDR standard (backed by a consortium consisting of a number of manufacturers) describes a lightweight, compact, removable hard disk drive compatible with a wide range of applications from AV to PC devices. The products on display will come in 2.5" and 1.8" form factors with parallel and serial ATA interfaces. Capacity will start at 80GB for around $170, but manufacturers hope to drop this to under $80 and well as double the capacity by next quarter." Here's hopin'
You could make a RAID of these things the size of a couple of decks of cards. And I imagine that they kick out less heat.
Seems like a candidate for use in the next generation iMac...
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
Just imagine if HP makes a jacket that fits this into an Ipaq... ::wets pants in anticipation::
Grass-roots web hosting.We are poor colleg
In other words, "we're still working out how to cripple it in a Hollywood-approved way with DRM."
This PCWorld thing is about a drive in some weird bigger enclosure which seems pointless. They should just make higher capacity PCMCIA drives.
just how delicate would these be....it still means nothing if I have to treat it like a baby. Id rather have tape disk still, which is probably way more shock resistant. True, this harddrive is selfcontained.
Do i think the benefits of portability outweigh the fact that its still just a harddrive? No.
Im all for solid state.
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
...Let me guess, they are focusing on what they do with it in the promo?
Though I know that IBM has sold its consumer hard drive assets to Hitachi I still have to wonder why IBM is not a member of this consortium, since IBM has a very active and large research department.
Wester Digital is also "missing"...
Anyone who knows more?
Sounds like a great partner to these.
Comments?
Put identity in the browser.
So who measured this thing? Hilary Rosen?
"Yes, well we saw that it had the capacity to appear to be a 2.5 inch disk if used at full capacity and fitted to your pc with a Sawzall and a ballpeen hammer."
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
An obsolete connector and other yet vapourware...
Why ignore the relevant, modern, already available standard, Firewire AKA IEEE-1394?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I see that Sony is absent from the list of members. One wonders whether they will ever use an industry standard storage in any of their products *cough* Compact Flash *cough*. It's almost ironic though, because they make massivly overpriced digital camaras that take standard computer media, floppies and CD-Rs. I'll like to beat a few sony execs will some memory sticks.
iPods use 1.8" Toshiba disks
mainboards are shipping with Serial ATA controllers onboard (Asus A7N8X-Deluxe amongst others.)
Moving parts: barbaric.
What I really want is a RAM drive the size of a Monolith.
-kgj
Man... thet's a lotta pr0n!
C|N>K
OK, so they use something that is used on some new systems instead of supporting many already existing ones across several different architectures.
Instead they support the incredibly bad parallel port, which is almost IBM PC-compatible exclusive.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
My crystal ball says: early units will have intolerable firmware glitches, you'll be instructed to download a patch, and whammo! any files it thinks you might not be authorized to have become inaccessible...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I haven't used that particular drive, but I can tell you that I've never had a problem with a LaCie product.
~Philly
I don't think that parallel refered to the old ieee1284 type parallel port, I think "parallel and serial ata" meant "old fashioned ribbon cable type ide" and serial ata.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
THIS is a good deal.
I have been using these HD racks since 2001 and I am very happy with them. A regular 3.5" desktop HD fits in one of these like a glove. I have a machine which can boot off of any of 4 hard drives. Just set your BIOS to autodetect your hard drive, and you are good to go.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
You know, every now and then I look down at my floppy drive and start to wonder if there will ever be another standard like it for removable storage. Does anyone know if the PC industry is working on that?
What prompted me to say that is here is another great little storage device that looks like it could be made to be portable and fairly rugged. Is technology changing too fast for the industry to want to standardize on a real floppy replacement?
For some reason I am not all that interested in carrying around a CD-R with me. They are nice, but 3.5" floppies seem more rugged and definitely smaller. Oh well.
Why is this consortium coming out with a "new" storage standard when so many good ones already exist? The answer can be found at http://www.ivdr.org/consortium/consortium_e.html, which the three working groups developing the standard. One is doing the hardware, and another is developing a spec for the file system -- neither of which is rocket science. But the third is focused on "security" -- in other words, DRM. This is the main purpose of the entire effort: To get the industry to standardize on a medium that's copy-protected from the get-go.
Old school disaster: data lost due to power surge, cracker attack, backup tape erasure, or three-alarm fire
New school disaster: data lost when tech sneezes, blowing rice-grain size multiterrabyte storage device into cracks between floor tiles
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
A 2.5 inch hard disk has a 2.5 inch diameter platter. The entire assembly is generally slightly larger than 2.5 inches; in fact, being three dimensional objects, many hard disks have width, depth, and mass as well.
Of course, even if that weren't common knowledge, the parent post still wouldn't be funny.
MSK
In 1992-1996 companies were developing 1.8" technology.
Places like MiniStor, Maxtor and Aerial (SP?). Although since density was a lot less then they were only turning things out in densities of about ~130MB at the end of it.
Some of these were available with a ATA interface, some with a PCMCIA Type III, (11mm high), some were a Type IV (13+mm high). a Type III device will take the space of 2 pcmcia slots. Most standard pcmcia stuff is type II. (5mm)
HP actually had a 1.3" hard-drive out at that time, in 20MB and 40MB configurations. This was called (nicknamed?) the kitty-hawk.
All the products eventually vanished off of the market. MiniStor went bankrupt in 1995, Aerial (SP?) i think folded a bit after it, and maxtor I think just gave up on it.
From a shock perspective, things like compactflash offer a better shock resistance, but less capacity.
Oh, and the difference between 5.25 and 3.5 and 2.5 and 1.8 and 1.3 is that each disk is half the surface area of the other. So assuming the same number of platters and same density, each size drive would have half the capacity.
-- C
These things had better be more reliable than those horrible, horrible Castlewood ORB Drives That were 'all the rage' a few years ago. The disks and/or drives were immensly unreliable. Strangely more so under Linux. The company has already gone out of business (www.castlewood.com doesn't even resolve anymore).
It is because female insulation Displacement Connectors (for cables) & male header combo are cheaper.
Try pricing out the reverse.
but manufacturers hope to drop this to under $80 and well as double the capacity by next quarter."
Will the under-$80 price be before or after the mail-in rebate?
How exactly is SATA better than IEEE 1394 (firewire) for internal uses? Do you like being limited to the number of ports the motherboard manufacturer thought was necessary? 1394 allows you to chain devices, akin to scsi - much more convenient.
SATA requires a special power connector too, likely on the motherboard itself. 1394 gives you power too, in one little connector.
Linux certainly does support 1394. When our tape library failed at work, we replaced it with a bunch of firewire disks. Not only do they offer more storage at a lower cost, but they are all simultaneously online and are hell of a lot faster than tape. See linux1394.org
Do you really want to perpetuate the cruft that is ATA? You don't need drivers for SATA because it inherits many of PATA's limitations. Personally, i like hotswap (important for software raid) and i like isochonous transfer (good for cd burners as well as video streams). 1394 requires new drivers because it offers more. Linux has no problem reading 1394 drives. Windows has no problem reading 1394 drives. MacOS has no problem reading 1394 drives. How difficult would it have been to boot off of 1394? The only real obstacle is that anachonism - the PC BIOS. Replace with linuxBIOS and you'd be golden.
If Apple and Co had not decided to tax firewire, we would have had this years ago. Back in the days of the FX chipset, intel promised to include 1394 in it's motherboard chipsets, right next to USB. But no. They didn't want to be beholden to a third party, so they went off and invented the abomination that is USB2.
You are obviously right. My fault. And yet I would prefer SCSI and Firewire, both of which give you better external and internal options, and at least SCSI better performance and quality too.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
The only reason for this is to make the disc braindead, to let Hollywood, the Music industry and Microsoft decide what you can and can't store on your own hard drive. And if you think you'll use it with a nice open source OS like Linux, think again.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Well, while we're discussing ways of improving the iPod, here's what I want to see - simple recording software and an input jack. So I can plug my turntables into the iPod wherever I am and record without a laptop, and preferably it won't sound like ass. Or connect a mic and record a meeting or whatever. Is the processor too slow to do that? I know there are other devices with this functionality.
The other thing that would be great is if you could tell the iPod to delete a certain song on the fly; sometimes I listen to a song and wonder why the hell I ripped it to the iPod but the chances that I'll remember to delete it next time I connect the ipod to the computer are slim indeed.
Why Firewire cannot work inside the case? To me this seems yet another instance of inferior technology taking the spotlight from superior ones.
Too bad SCSI and Firewire are suffering from the herd instinct of the industry... give me them anytime over ATA. I would gladly pay the price for the quality.
Why not? There are drivers. Are them too bad?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Amen, i have the *exact* same rack from the same place, damn, i love compgeeks.
:)
After looking at the IDVR site, i couldn't help to wonder what the difference was. What's the improvement, what's the features? It's a hard drive, all be it, a smaller one than a laptop drive. So what?? This would probably be something worth while for those people who like to build super small PCs, but like you, i'll stick with my racks.
heh, the reason why i got that particular model is because a friend of mine has the same type/brand. So it makes for easy file sharing when i can't lug my PC around. @ $6.95 a rack you can't beat that price/versitility ratio
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
I eagerly await 800Mbps and 1.6Gbps firewire (both are supposed to come in 2003.) I doubt we will ever see (but I hope to be wrong on this one) the 3.2Gbps fiberoptic+copper-for-power 1394 specification, but I don't think that's even been formalized yet...
Do the math now, firewire is 50MBps (400Mbps) and will soon be 100MBps (800Mbps) and eventually 200MBps (1.6Gbps), all over copper. At that point there will really be no reason to use SCSI any more, SCSI with its atrociously expensive cabling and terminators... Gotta hate that aspect. I guess Serial ATA is supposed to do tagged queueing, and maybe ATA133?
Anyway it's time for some PC BIOS to have firewire boot support, people should put 1394 on all motherboards like USB is supported now. It's becoming a more and more common thing now that DV camcorders are down below $500.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd rather see them add a microphone so It could be used a a dictophone.
YNMV and all that..
Firewire wasn't designed with the DRM hacks in mind, so a firewire drive would not be crippled enough to make it useless for your needs, so you can't spend your own hard earned money on that.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The 80GB drives mentioned are almost certainly 2.5" drives. In fact very little is said about 1.8" drives. The highest capacity 1.8" drives currently available are the 20GB Toshiba drives embedded in devices like the iPod. 80GB 2.5" drives are just beginning to appear now. 80GB drives in the 1.8" form factor are quite a ways off.
I work with the drive manufactures in the Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI specification working groups and the drive connector (it's almost identical for both protocols) had to fit on a 2.5" disk. All drives are going to be 2.5", even in the enterprise. Many newer drive models have 2.5" platters inside already. The transition to 2.5" enclosures will be mostly cosmetic.
With that in mind, working on a new, smaller form-factor just makes sense.
Hmm...I'd swear I had SuSE running off a FireWire hard drive before. I needed a boot floppy since FireWire drives aren't bootable (no firmware on the controller to enable booting), but once the kernel was loaded from the floppy, everything else ran off of the hard drive.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
If they're really able to do ~80GB disks for ~$166, that's a much more attractive format for many things than Dataplay, assuming they don't go too far out of their way making it unusable via DRM. The 1.8" version sounds really good for a followup iPod, and if it's removable, it's easier to swap back and forth between your TiVo and your PC.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm currently using 3.5" drives, in removable drawers that make them take up 5.25" disk drive formats. It would be quite nice to be able to use the smaller slots, especially if they get the Serial-ATA worked out so the cabling's simpler, and having 80GB removables for a TiVo-like device would be convenient.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Many current Linux distributions aren't very competent about partitioning and installing on disks less than about 4-6GB - my lab has a bunch on antiques with 2GB and or 2BG + 540MB sets like yours, and it's really annoying - especially because RedHat 6.x was too insecure to run for very long on a DSL line exposed to the outside world. RH7.x was better, Mandrake 8.x also seems good enough (and does a much better partitioning job), and I'm going to try Knoppix if I can get a good CD-R burn (I've been having troubles with burners.) My home machine had a 6GB disk, dualbooted with 2GB for Linux and 4GB for Windows. In the last year, the price of disks has dropped radically - it's hard to buy a desktop drive smaller than 10GB, and 80BG drives on sale are ~$80, or ~$129 not on sale. You should just go out and buy a decent disk - if you're on a budget that may only be 30GB, but it's still a big win over 540MB or 2GB. Once you do, of course, you'll then have the entertainment of figuring out whether your BIOS can actually detect the drive, or whether your motherboard is made by somebody who's still in businss, and whether downloads are available, and whether you're going to risk trashing the thing if you screw up too badly (which means spending $99 at Fry's to replace the motherboard+CPU with a new ~1.3GHz one.
When I started my current round of machine upgrades, rule #1 was that all the disks go in removable-disk drawers. That does mean they take 5.25" slots instead of 3.5", and adds about $25/slot for the hardware (about $12 for spare drawers), but it's way more convenient. It turns out that my firmware doesn't do a good job of autodetecting changes in disk drives, so I end up having to kick the thing a couple of times at boot when I actually do switch drives, but it's still a big win. If I were doing this in my lab, as opposed to home, I'd standardize on using all the same size and same partitioning for removables.
I first upgraded the machine by adding a 20GB drive (which it recognized fine without the BIOS upgrade), and then replacing the 6GB drive with a 120GB (5400 rpm was $129 on sale; this week they had 7200rpm with 8MB buffers for that price after rebate.) I don't really know what to do with that much space, so there are a couple of extra 10GB partitions for installing different Linux versions in once I get around to it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think for Tivo-like devices you'll always want as much capacity as you can get, which for now still means 3.5" drives.
Until 3.2Gbps 1394 comes out it cannot likely replace SCSI entirely, but for the home user a PC with four 1394 buses and a couple USB 2.0 would likely have all the I/O capability they will ever need, no matter how wired their house gets. Most faster hard drives only push about 20 MB/sec peak sustained read... some of the 15k SCSI drives will obviously do more than that. Even if you say 40, the 3.2Gbps firewire should be more than fast enough, especially since 1394 is a lot easier (and cheaper) to implement than SCSI. You can afford to have more buses.
Serial ATA might be closer to 1394 in terms of implementations, though. IDE was always supposed to be cheap and this solves the connector and cable problem. However, if you're already doing 1394, why even bother with SATA? Add more 1394 interfaces and provide them internally.
Optimally I'd like to see a motherboard without any slots beyond two AGP 8x slots, and with a number of 1394 buses and USB 2.0 buses, perhaps 4 of each? And of course some DIMM slots, and onboard ethernet and sound, and maybe some cheap video, but that's optional. There should be an internal asynchronous 1394 bus for storage devices, and then a handful of external for everything else. I think that a PC like this fulfills the needs of the home user much more closely than the current PCI-expanded PCs of today; USB peripherals are inexpensive (for modems and such) and additional storage can come from firewire-connected systems; You can always add SCSI or IDE peripherals this way.
Meanwhile, of course, all of the 1394 buses are connected to the system via a PCI bus, 64 bit if necessary, which should be a lot cheaper to implement if you're not actually putting any connectors on it. The CPU in this dream machine is sledgehammer, as it is a nice big 64 bit CPU which will run all my legacy 32 bit code just perfectly.
A system like this would seem to be ideal for most business use as well. The only down side I can see there is that you're more likely to have external peripherals which your company's IT policy may require you to secure (lock) to the workstation (desk).
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"