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Credit Card sized 5GB HD to arrive late this year
An anonymous reader writes "PC World reports in this article:
"The card actually has moveable parts inside its thin shell," says Bill Heil, vice president of StorCard.
A spinning wheel made of Mylar is engaged when the card is inserted into a StorReader, a USB-connected drive or PC Card that reads and writes to the StorCard. The reader is expected to retail for under $100 and the cards for under $15 each, Heil says.
The StorCard and StorReader are scheduled to become available in the second half of 2003."
filling up your credit card with hard disks...
Rather odd grammatical construction, no?
so the drive itself is actually the size of a PC card at the minimum .. as you need the media and the reader together to constitute a drive ..
This thing doesn't have much mass but it's going to have a huge rotational inertia. I can see somebody carrying this in a laptop and walking around a corner only to be flung to the ground. I guess if they installed two, one upside down the angular momentum would cancel and they could be hauled around safely. Assuming the cases were strong enough not to crush each other.
Calling the drive a StorReader when it both reads and writes is a bit misleading.
Does anyone know what kind of speeds these things can achieve?
I wonder how durable/reliable they are. These could really take off, especially as the price is so reasonable.
It's about time that large amounts of affordable portable storage becomes available. $69 for a 128MB UBS key chain was just too much.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
iPod 2 anyone?
What exactly will become of the HD?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
hell i thought the hd was trying to become pregnant. perhaps it was having fertiltiy problems, but i personally think 5gb is too young for a hd to have children.
-- john
Aren't they about the right size for containing a movie with pretty decent picture quality? One could imagine using these in preference over DVD-RW, provided that set top boxes that can read these become available. At least they are not too "encumbered", unlike DVD's.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I suspect that Duke Nukem Forever will be released using this new media.
Cmdr Taco's grammar checker to become late 2007, at the earliest.
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
When you have sat on your wallet and broke your card it's gonna be a real bith for the store clerk to type in all your information.
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
Release of 5GB HDD to be delayed.
Games Workshop Petition
If they already know it's going to become late why don't they just push back the release date?
Trip to the ballpark with teenage son: $25.
Trip to computer store for card reader: $100.
Trip to radio shack for odds-n-ends: $30.
Look on son's face when he cracks into the secret pr0n cache on your new credit card: Priceless.
Cool, but it scares me a little. At $15 a card, how much of our personal information will we be forced to carry around in our pockets? Take for example a national ID based on this card, it would have enough memory to store your medical information, financial information, school information, etc... Reminds me of Gattaca
Its amazing that they are able to fit that data density and functionality (realtime encryption/decryption of data) into something the size of a credit card for 'under $15', but the reader is about $100.
I wonder if they could fit their technology into a Compact Flash I/II format - it would give IBM's micro drives a run for their money.
A Credit Card sized 5GB HD is never late, Hemos Baggins.
It arrives on the market precisely when it means to!
This sounds like another magic storage device...like the quarter sized one that would only cost 5 bucks for 200megs or whatever.
The article said it had the bandwidth to handle video streaming...I'll believe it when I see it.
But I have to admit...it would be nice
for me this is a typical 'I want to believe' case. Especially as far as the annouced retail prices are concerned.
-- Or So Tewfik Wrote. --
CD-writer? Video-recorder? First-poster? =)
This thing is a 5G, credit-card sized floppy?
My BS-o-meter is currently pegged reading this. I hope no one is holding off on getting that dvd-writer because of this vaporware.
Maybe they are planning to kill off the technology.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Trying to coin a new phrase ... "All your base are to become late"
finally its here! i want an mp3 portable with one of these.
altough im kinda skeptical if we will actually see it happen. remember those quarter sized 300mb disks that were supposed to be a big hit last year? put all kinds of restriction on them and tried to sell drm music on it. no wonder noone bought it
The real driving force for small, portable, removable media is not the computer industry but the photographic one. Do I care if I can carry around a credit card sized disk if all I can use it in is a computer? Compact flash storage prices are coming down and capacities are going up. How long will it be before they reach the multiple GB mark?
I don't see this as being a major player unless it gets adopted my a photo manufacturer. That's only going to happen if they can demonstrate write speeds to match solid state devices.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
How many drive does a computer user need to read every type of disk currently avaible on the market?
There are just to many. what good is a disk if you cannot exchange it with your classmates or collegue's.
will raise the price to $200?
Cause obviously this thing is going to hold my entire mp3 collection...I don't see any other use.
The article says
Amazingly, within the card is an on-board processor containing integrated software controls that can encrypt data securely in real time.
so I went looking and found the StorCard website. It says
There are two types of cryptography logic; a PKI system providing authentication logic, and a block encryption algorithm, such as AES. The encryption keys for both the cryptography engines (supporting 1024 bit keys) are stored in local RAM, which is not accessible external to the card. All data on the StorCard's recording disk is encrypted and block encryption is done "on-the-fly".
What I am less thrilled with is their emphasis on storing biometric data and trying to get what they see as a huge amount of money being spent on ID cards.
.signature: No such file or directory
With such good technology you`d have thought they could have come up with something a tad more inspiring than "StorCard".. its not even spelled right.
RTAS = Read The Article Silly
... but reading is also fundamental. Try it sometime. If you had, you would've read that:
I know reading is a drag
"Also, the card--like a credit card--is extremely flexible, without risking damage to the data it contains, he says."
Taco's ESL grammar aside, this sounds like another proprietary mass storage system with a cheap drive unit and disposable cartridges. Reminds me of "Give them the razor, sell them the blades". Remember Zip drives? Jaz drives? etc etc? Open standard CD and CDRs obliterated them.
Thanks but no thanks. With a large hard drive in a laptop and a larger one in a server at home I don't see the need.
Trolling is a art,
I'd love to have a iPod with a card reader (forget the internal hard drive) to go. Full? Want another "library"...
Or how about just sliding a card into the dash of your car for tunes on the road? THIS could replace household CD players as we know them today...
you now have the unique oportunity not only to lose your credit card, but a whole digital identity.
make backups of your cash card now!
Since there are moving parts in the storage media, won't there be a bigger risk of damage to the media compared to Flash storage media? Wonder how long will each card's warranty be.
This sounds like the next generation floppy. A spinning mylar disc? Sounds about as reliable as a floppy. Basically write twice, then dispose.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
So, this means that the iPod will either come down in price, or start using these cards. Imagine having an iPod that takes these 5 gig (and in the future, larger, I'd assume) drive cards. Boom, suddenly your iPod isn't limited to 5, 10 or 20 gigs! WooHoo! I can finally justify buying one.
-Andy
At $15 per card, the price is definitely right, but I wonder if your data is safe... No, not in a data security point-of-view, but in simple mechanics and durability.
:)
It helps that the r/w head is not contained within the card itself, but I wonder how resistant it is to dust, flexing, and people simply sitting on it. Such cards are begging to be placed within a wallet, where guys like me will sit on them...
Side note: With RSA's solid-state SecurID cards, I typically see about 1 out of every 15 get broken from what users perceive as "normal use". Interestingly enough, both men and women manage to break them from "accidentally crushing it" -- I had imagined that most of the broken cards would come from men putting it into their wallets and sitting in them, but it seems women put their cards in purses, and purses get stepped on and what-not quite often as well... (small sample (500) though, so here's your grain of salt to go with the data...
Which brings up the issue of backing up the data... On a USB 2.0 bus, backing up 5GB's is not that bad, but on a USB 1.1 bus, a full backup would be quite painful... I suppose daily backups/synchronizations would help, but as you know, we humans love to procrastinate...
Mylar suggests a floppy, rather than hard disk to me. 3.5" floppies are still floppies even though they are encased in a shell
-- Oh Well
The article states that they're already in talks with content producers. They also make a point of stating that it's large and fast enough to stream media and that it has an onboard processor capable of on-the-fly encryption. Looks like they wanna see these things on the shelves next to dvds. Also, the article says that the cards store anywhere from 100 mb to 5 gb. Does this mean that the 'under $15' pricetag they talk about is for a 100mb model? Anybody got any more info?
do not read this line twice.
"Credit Card sized 5GB HD to become late this year"
So...:
1. Is it coming late this year, or
2. Is it on target but is going to become late sometime later this year, or
3. Is it going through a transcendant, life-changing experience sometime during this year, or...
GF.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Umm.. I would think that this thing being flexible would somehow cause some kind of damage to the parts inside. Seems to me that if you bend it, purposely or accidentally, it'll be screwy.
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
so how durable is this unit going to be? If you drop it is it going to be unreadable? What about heat? If you leave your wallet in the winshield with one of these things is it going to mess up the data? Did anyone do any stress tests on these things?
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
I call vaporware. Breakthroughs do occur, but if you compare this against the IBM microdrive this thing is a lot smaller in size, has five times the capacity and costs US$ 15 instead of US$ 200. Would be very cool, but I don't think so.
I see lots of comparisons to other drive technologies, but is that the competition? With better conenctivity (e.g. mobile/wireless net access, WiFi islands, DSL in hotels) do I really need portable storage? If I can connect to my fixed storage from nearly anywhere, why do I need to carry yet another piece of hardware?
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
Yea, that's great. Let's give employers access to that data too! Then they can screen folks who have diseases or "chronic problems" that they don't want to deal with.
Medical information in a database? Are you fucking nuts? Yea, if it was SECURE I'd be all for it. But it won't be. And guaran-goddamned-tee life insurance companies will want access to it as soon as it's available. "Mr. Schkerke we see here that you weighed 300 pounds in 1996. Even though you only currently weight 150 pounds now we're going to have to charge you the overweight rate." Don't think that won't happen? For Christ's sake look at the Finnish double taxxing radio broadcasts. Buy a record, pay taxes to listen! Look at the crazy bullshit the RIAA is trying.
Government is nothing more than a corporate whore. The sooner you people realize this the better. The government does NOTHING to help you personally. Everything they do is approved and endorsed by some corporation whose got their dick stuck up their reprsentatives' ass.
And that's not just in the US either.
Wake up and smell the coffee.
My reality check bounced.
That price seems really cheap to me. The latest Zip750 goes way above that price, comparatively, and has much larger media, physically. There must be some drawback to these, something they're not telling us. How do companies like Iomega plan on responding to this product?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
well, thatpretty much answers everyones question as far as video use...forget about using it to watch your divx files from...
If this StorCard is what it claims to be, and if it's sufficiently durable and reliable, it could just be the technology that finally makes smart cards really widespread.
Why? Well, one of the major things holding smart cards back has been the fact that, in most cases, consumers have no interest in them. All kinds of fantastically-useful applications have been dreamed up, but nearly all of them fail because the infrastructure costs are astronomical, and blow the business case out of the water. This card, however, offers significant value to the consumer, enough that people will be willing to pay for the cards and to buy and install readers on their home computers. There will still be significant costs to build the software, the host-side systems, deploy kiosks and terminals at stores, doctor's offices, etc., but the cost of cards and home readers are a huge burden, and this could lift it.
The Storcard web site has a PDF with "Technical Specifications", but it appears to be slashdotted or just not there, so I can't see what kind of interfaces the card supports. I would really hope they'd include an ISO 7816 (smart card) serial interface in addition to the high-speed interface. They're claiming the card has a processor for crypto and access control, which is critically important. The one other major question in my mind is durability -- is this a card that is expected to be carefully inserted inside a digital camera and then left there except to be occasionally (carefully) placed in a PC-attached reader? Or is it something I can keep in my wallet, sit on, run through the washing machine, use as an ice scraper, etc.?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Will bending the card cause a head crash? Or are these more like zip drives, in which the read head is in the reader and engages the disk only when inserted?
I can't imagine too many people would want to carry these around in their wallets if a slight bend could destroy them....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
And it looks like they will provide a PCMCIA-style reader device as well. This provides excellent backward compatibility, but the real test will be to get support from a major hardware vendor (Dell, Apple, HP?) and bundle the card reader into new PC's.
Some weirdness in their product description though. "...the StorReader supports a sustained data transfer rate of 5 megabytes per second in the 100 megabyte StorCard, and scales in the 5 gigabyte design".
I wonder what they mean by "scales".... YMMV?
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
The article says that storage space is between 100 meg and 5 gig. I bet that much like the buz phrase: "With upgradable fimware to support future media formats....cough OGG" -- that you will be holding a bunch of 15 dollar 100 meg cards with another soon to be famous "Will support up to 5 gig" promise that will never materialize. (And then just at the end of the products life -- they will come out with a handful of really expensive 5 gig cards -- at the same time they start to list their coffee machines and foozball tables on ebay....)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
How is this significantly different than a 3.5" floppy? Size is huge yes, but technology wise, it sounds like a really good floppy.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I just assumed it was getting together with a Zip disk and planning a little portable storage family...
The Humblest Mollusk on the Net
I think this device will only take off if they don't include any content control like floppy discs or CDs. Remember what happened to Dataplay ???
Excuse me, but this technology is already well established. We thought it was obsolete.
In Memorium: One 5Gb hard drive. Died peacefully in its sleep last night after a brief illness.
In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the "Help Slashdotters with Grammar" foundation.
Spinning wheel of mylar?
That is a floppy folks, not a hard drive.
Grammer odd not, I think.
-yoda.
OK. Maybe my caffeine hasn't kicked in yet, but what good does this do? I mean, it sounds like there is an encryption chip on each card or drive, essentially. Is this really that much better than a smaller chip with just a password control? Is someone really going to separate whatever passes for a platter, try to read it somewhere else, and then hit the encryption? If it requires a password, wouldn't it be possible to write something that basically just keeps throwing things at it until it cracks?
Maybe there is more to it than was there, or I missed it, but it seems that the encryption may just be marketing. I don't see how to access the drive without the chip.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
And it will be found in a dumpster with 5000 credit card numbers. ;-)
"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late." "Late?" said Arthur. "What for?" "What is your name, human?" "Dent. Arthur Dent," said Arthur. "Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly. "It's a sort of threat you see." Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes. "I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."
>Maybe they are planning to kill off the technology
;)
Nah, they're just testing a new strategy in vaporware... Let everyone know it's not going to materialize first, then the investors can't possibly be upset when it's late!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Click on the -products- link there to see an interesting illustration of uses of the Storcard.
They somehow think that MS is going to let them use these things in the XBox.
Secondly, the site says "capacity from 100 megabytes to 5+ gigabytes". Which do you think will cost $15?
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
I got a credit card shaped CD from The Halifax (UK), 15mb capacity, with some flash demo on it...
Is this the same type of thing?
Don't let facts get in the way of a good headline.
People use the wrong terms all the time, it is MUCh less stressful to just give up.
are available here.
Well, at least some of the juicy technical details.
Well, at least it references an ISO standard (ISO 7816).
Is this going to be one of those micro-storage devices that starts at $15/media but approaches $500 for any useful storage capacity? (ie the IBM microdrive)
within the card is an on-board processor containing integrated software controls that can encrypt data securely in real time.
The increased concerns with information security for consumers, enterprises and content owners
bind information to a particular application or device.
Security & Intelligence - industry's first intelligent media with the ability to authenticate an individual and his own data, to encrypt and secure the data, and to enforce policy information on how and when the data may be used
StorCard uses a combination of storage, processing and security technologies, packaged into a convenient credit card form factor. An on-board processor with integrated software controls authentication encrypts data securely and executes policies that manage the data. The information is stored on the integrated high-capacity rotating storage volume. The result is a 100% secure, environment that allows individuals, enterprise and content providers to transact and exchange information safely and comfortably wherever and whenever it is needed.
(a) the encryption logic and keys are unique for each storage medium or unit, (b) the algorithm and the key can be economically changed without compromising legal access to the content, and (c) information pertaining to the algorithm or the key is always kept secret, and is never made available or communicated over a public channel.
the security logic can be programmed to allow access which is time dependent or for a predetermined number of accesses after which the key and the data in the storage volume is randomly ERASED.
mailto:info@storcard.com
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I guess you insert available in the story title, and fired in my subject.
How is this any different then burning a CD.
500-700 megs in 1.5-2 minutes.
nearly 10 tiumes the size in about 10 times the time.
This isn't unreasonable.
I just thought it was refreshingly honest technology reporting. New technology we were promised this year has snowball's chance in hell of actually coming out this year. It will be late.
From the website it suggest the card only contains the disc plus some simple electronics. The actual motor for the device is held in the reader.
But there are already PC card hard drives that can hold 5 GB of space. So if you are going to have to put it in a PC card adapter each time you want to use it then the size benefit is cancelled out.
I've been to their site and had a quick look, but found only this:
Does "scales" means what I think it does? It's surely too good to be true that, if the 100 meg card is 5 megabytes a second, that the 5 gig card is 250 meg a second. Yeah, that's too good to be true. Plus knowing me my math is probably off.
I'm guessing that since they mention USB but not USB2 that it's not fast enough for broadcastable video. But I can hope. :-)
But, gee, i mean, mine keeps breaking officer, you know how this cutting edge technology is when you spill a beer on it and then step on it accidentially while drunk.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Now that the processor speeds for PDA's are increasing and the OS's more rich in features..this could be a great addition to the market. Slap one in side and have storage for MP3's..etc.
If I have to buy a separate reader (USB & FireWire please) I'd rather not take the chance of the media (the card-drive itself) breaking on me as it makes repeated transitions from wallet to reader or bouncing around in my pocket and being subjected to other thermal/physical stresses.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
and see how well the media stands up to time. I remember thinking how great the 2GB ORB drives were but the drive quality never seemed to get there. When I see another /. article in a year saying how great these things are and how they are revolutionizing the industry I may commit some data to them.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
So how long unil we can buy 4 days worth of music for $50, then play it on a player the size of a wallet that holds 8 cards?
Anyway, I'm wondering how well these cards can handle forces.
-Derick
Hopefully we'll have lots of HD-lets around.
Seriously, why USB? Why do I have to use an external connector and external device for something that I'd much rather have inside? Why not a 3,5"/' (damned imperial system) bay slot as a reader? And if it comes with internal processor and all, why not use it as a removable network drive? Users stuff their creditcard into the reader, machine reads stored username and key, compares it with domain server, grants user access to his or her network files while having 5gb for other programs...
Hate me!
Remember dataplay, quarter sized disks holding huge amounts. Going to replace minidiscs/ had music companies signed up etc..etc..
What happened? While technically feasable the implimentation was too difficult. Delays and out of cash.
Joins a long list of failed media. MD-Data, Jazz, SyQuest, Digital Compact Casset..
While the technology is neat, I'll beleive it when I see it.
Why? Those specs are way faster than is needed for watching DIVX-movies (lessee : high-quality DIVX : 1 cd / 1 hour) ==> 700Mb / 3600s ==> 200 kb/s
Even DVD is easily possible (4.7GB/2hours = 650 kb/s). At 5MB/s DVD-quality HDTV is feasible.
The technical specs for the cards say they only work between 5C and 55C. Not much use for large parts of the Global in winter. Non operating mode goes down to -20C.
;-(
So using it in your portable PDA, MP3/OGG player etc in winter is just too bad
Just bigger and a bit smaller. Maybe more like the Jaz drive.
The Zip drive was as cool piece of gear, I still use mine fairly regularly to shuttle files to and from the office.
I'm wondering, though, if this thing will have the same drawbacks, namely:
- too slow, both throughput and seek time. Made it OK for archiving, but you couldnt really run software off it
- too expensive, when CD-Rs started being a buck a pop, 20 bucks for 100 meg zip disks was silly
- too prone to failure. They frankly wore out too quick
- The Jaz drives were notoriously buggy and glitchy, and died all the time. A good friend had one and did nothing but cuss about it
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Another expensive device I'll accidentally sit on.
There is a difference between not reading and not believing.
And I doubt that these cards will be unscathed when some 20 stone lardass sits down on them on a regular basis, and given the increasing number of 20 stone lardasses around I think there will be a few problems.
If it seems too good to be true...it probably is.
Until it's in actually on the market for $150 then it's VaporWare....just another press release designed to drum up money for someone who has a neat idea....or maybe needs a new Beemer...whatever.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Great, now I have to rip the White Album again.
For marketing to geeks, they need to release the cards in various colors of red, orange, green and so forth to make them look like the cards they were always inserting into the computers in Star Trek.
I still find it facinating to compare some of the technology "predicted" in that series and things that are around today.
"The card actually has moveable parts inside its thin shell,"
Anyone have an idea of the mean time between failure on that?
For great justice.
What's the difference, concept wise, between this and a floppy disc?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Customer: Here, use my StorCard.
Clerk: Ok, let me just pop it into the reader here....
Clerk: Um, Sir, this card just contains porn.
Customer: Uh, uh, how did that get on there!?
"I bet I'll get blamed for this." --Mayor Quimby
I'd rather have a regular-sized HD with lots of storage (say 100gig or so to start) with a built in rechargeable battery and Bluetooth. I'd put this thing in my briefcase and forget it. Form factor becomes less important when you talk about something that sits in your briefcase all day.
Don't get me wrong, increasing storage density is a worthy goal, but we actually have the technology today to build the bluetooth thingy and this would solve a need for lots of people.
MP3 players, portable video players, cell phones, whatever... could feed off this storage. Oh yeah, you could plug it in to your computer at home or at the office with USB2 or firewire when you need higher xfer rates for things like backup or working off the actual drive.
I carry around a pocketec 20gig usb2 hard drive already, I just wish it were actually useful when it isn't plugged into something. I would gladly carry something 3 or 4 times as big if it had bluetooth and a battery.
Why is it important for it to be the shape of a credit card? Considering how thin it is, I'm sure with the moving parts inside of it, they would never recommend placing this thing in your wallet and sitting on it. I would rather have something that fits better on a keychain or is inside my cell phone.
http://www.askthevoid.com
Ok, this looks really cool, but I wonder how they will hold up? I used to have an old car stereo made by Blaupunkt, which used a smartcard like this instead of a removeable faceplate for security. After about a year of use, the microprocessor had pretty much seperated from the card and was about to fall out. I also was never comfortable with the card being able to flex like a credit card like they promise because it was actually a little stiffer, and felt more brittle than a credit card.
Of course, a years worth of use on a card like that for under $15 still isn't bad, I would just hope that I would be able to get my data from the card before it came apart. This also has the added complexity of moving parts inside, so it might be even less reliable than my stereo's card was. That is some really cool technology though.
Curious how long it will take for people to disguise these as credit cards and smuggle data across the border.
They are going to face what has just about put iomega out of business. I can already buy 4.7GB dvd+r media for $3-4... By the time this comes out we'll be starting to be close to the Blu-Ray discs that hold 27GB and will probably be just as cheap as these $15 drives. I just don't see it happening - especially when you need a dedicated reader. So as far as removable media it is doomed.
Then as far as a one time standalone? The fact that you need a special reader kills it. Notebook harddrives are already very small and higher density (even have 20GB in an iPod!) and the IBM Microdrive is already out in 4GB and will fit in a standard compact flash slot. Just don't see this happening.
You have obviously never used a digital camera in the middle of africa. Thousands of photos begging to be taken, and no internet connectivity of any sort (short of sattelite) for hundreds of kilometers.
There is a place for this sort of thing. My Mavica and a stack of floppy disks didn't do too badly, but I really would have liked to have higher resolution.
...is still a frigging HD, much like, "the king of spam is still a spammer".
Let's abandon the whole small HD idea already and go for solid state.
Wouldn't something like this make public terminals more useful?
5 GB of encrypted data is more than enough to store a complete desktop workspace and even if it's not durable enough to put in a wallet, it IS small enough for a shirt or front pocket. The ideal companion software for this device would be an operating system utility to dump your entire workspace onto the card so you can set up anywhere anytime without worrying about setup hassles or security. The article mentions onboard encryption so even losing the device wouldn't be an immediate loss or compromise of your workspace property.
At my work, we have a network infrastructure problem so our system admins won't give us roaming profiles even though the nature of our business means that we don't always work at our own desks. A 5-10 meg profile doesn't seem that large, but in our case (old building, old/clunky LAN) it's too much to shove over the network each time we log on, so we have to manually set up a user profile on each computer. An encrypted card with our workspace and profile on it might make for a tidy solution and reduce network load even when we finally get our new LAN up and running someday, because we could take that card and load our profile anywhere even when away from the home office.
It would need OS support and reasonably cheap hardware and you can't count on Microsoft to play ball unless they thought of it first, but the potential seems obvious.
Now I can upgrade to something better than my wonderful Replay drive! Oh, wait...uh...hm.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Mod parent up.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Yes it's only January but this looks like such a wonderful invention and at such a great price that it most likely dose not exist. I.e. It's probebly Vaporware.
On the off chance that it is not I will personaly be buying some for "data archiving". (I.e. Pron Warehose.)
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
In the mean time the rest of us will ignore the small details.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Another peice of Vaporware!
I am going to put this right next to my
roll-out big screen tv and my hovercraft!
Of course it's going to be late! True news would be, "Really neat toy to arrive on scheduled release date." May even arrive early, says manufacturer. Industry shocked, film at 11.
Volatile is not the word you want to use here.
If this were volatile, it would be almost useless. Volatile memory storage is defined as storage that doesn't retain data between power cycles. (i.e. all RAM , whether static or dynamic. NVRAM is a misnomer - It's just volatile RAM with a battery backup)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
At the low end 100mb, thats teh size of .zip discs today and at the upper end the size of a DVD. I just dont see a use for it if its going be connected via USB. most laptops have CD-R burners that give more than 100mb, dvd-RW or dvd+RW in laptops give the upper end of storage.
my PDA has a SD slot that takes 512mb(i heard 1gb comming) and the CF can take a 1GB-2GB microdrive. most PDA's dont have usb or a reader so i'm not sure at whom this is targeted.
More info is available if you visit the company's website (which oddly isn't linked in the pcworld article).
From the site:
Storage capacity from 100MB to multi-gigabyte capacity* (in future generations).
Also, in the slideshow it shows a graph of the product scaling from 100MB in 2003 to 1 gig in 2004 to 5 gigs in 2005, at a constant price of $15.
So, they won't be selling high-priced large capacity drives, as they won't be available and when they are they will remain at the current pricepoint.
I think this could have some usefull applications, depending on how well it is accepted and whether they can actually produce a product that scales as well as they say.
I guess these guys haven't heard of dvdrw.
Seriusly why would I want to spend 15$ for 5GB of sotrage that is only good with a special drive that has no other use besides storage. At about a dollar a blank and falling DVD-RW offer all the functionality of this product for a fraction of the cost and you can play movies in the drive, burn cdr, run programs etc...
This does not sound too exciting to me with all the development going into holographic storage and the ability to archive terabytes onto state of the art media. 5gb is simply not enough to do very much anymore.
That means that everyone will have access to everything! Just imagine the results of it. Everyone pays exactly what they should for health insurance, and insurance companies never lose money on an idividual again. Employers can chose exactly the right people without having to look at resumes. Blacklists will be perfect as no thoughts are hidden. Police will know I'm a model citezen, productive and alturistic. They could check my entire email history to make sure I'm not a terrorist too. Advertisers can adjust their messages just for me. I can just imagine listening to the billboards ask the woman next to me on the subway if she needs more herpes medicine or how she's feeling after the divorce. You might get fucked with information like that! The world would be so much better if little things like personal dignitiy and privacy would not get in the way of making a buck. There are so many great uses for a card that has DRM, so that others can control and read the content, but I can not. What are we waiting for? Put everything in your pocket, but don't forget the dead tree diary so you can write, "I hate big brother" where it won't see you. I hope they won't have my Slashdot posts.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The CPCC tariff will be $23.82 CDN ($15.50 US)
I'm surprised nobody has made the connection with this story
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
How is this any better then the 5 gig Toshiba pcmcia HD I got for $150? Ok maybe it's a little bit thinner, but other then that is there a big difference?
Not that I think the poster's predication will happen, but would you _really_ want to carry around all of your personal info with you? What happens if you get mugged? Or lose your wallet? Or get pushed into a swimming pool at a party?
Shouldnt it be reported as 6.5K naked Britneys/Wallet^2
Storage density
...Vaporware?
/\d+/-gigabyte poker-chip drive are items you will never see.
This, the digital "film" for standard 35mm cameras, and the
With a Mylar disk, and such a thin form factor, they cant be expected to be too sturdy or last a long time..
Plus there is no way 5gb will be 15bucks.. that the 100m version.. But that price isn't bad compared to ( much more reliable ) ZIP disks..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My chem teacher in high school was a retired navy captain. Went to Annapolis in the 30s I believe, maybe 1920s. Real fun guy. He said he and some other midshipmen put a big gyroscope in a suitcase, got out of a taxi in front of a hotel and aimed it for the front door, wound it up, walked straight in, set it down, got a room, and the bellhop picked the suitcase up to take it to their room, turned a corner, and fell down when his arm went flying up and he lost control. He described it much better than I can, quite a gleam in his eyes. He was quite a joker...
Infuriate left and right
This one might work. Unlike CD protection systems that can be defeated with Sharpie pens.
within the card is an on-board processor containing integrated software controls that can encrypt data securely in real time
The logic to read the data on the card doesn't take place in your PC. It takes place in the reader. So, that's where the hacking has to take place. That is, hack the reader, or make your own reader. Which leads to the real practical nature of the DRM in this thing...the tiny size. It may be impractical to expect many hackers with regular soldering irons to work with something very small. But, I suspect it'll still be done. It'll likely be a hacked up reader that only needs to have a single resistor removed, or something goofy like that.
If RIAA/MPAA really wants DRM that isn't defeatable (everything is theoretically defeatable...practice is another thing) then they need to promote technology that is too impractical and/or costly for people without sophisticated labs to deal with. Maybe a nanotechnology hard drive where nanobots manipulate molecules in a ball of jello the size of a marble.
I have to second an above poster's question. A mylar disc, in a credit card sized plastic vessel, with the read head and motor in the 'reader' (the 'floppy disk drive'), initially only at 100MB...
Congratulations, you've re-engineered a LS120 disk to be slightly smaller and have its reader connect via USB.
levine
... would this card-disk survive a trip thru the washing machine when I forget and leave one in my shirt pocket?
When a self-contained card reader/writer comes out for this media, digital camera owners could plug this into the USB port on the camera and download the pictures to the HDD. This is also far better than buying a $215 1GB compact flash card.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing agaist this company or any company who wants to make a new smaller (larger storage) media. But heres my problem right now.
:)
I have an Olympus Digital camera that uses Smartmedia, I have my Zaurus that uses an SD card (and CF), and I am using a Sandisk CF with PCMCIA Adapter on my Laptop (for MP3's at work).
AND NOW theirs going to be YET ANOTHER type of media for me to use. I likehaving choice and all, but this is rediculous. I'd rather just have CF slots on everything and use the 1gig CompactFlash for everything. TOO MANY choices - equals a pain in the ass.
You "I'm looking for...."
Sales Man "Hay this would work great in your new Shindang"
You "oh? Where does it go?"
Sales Man "Well you need this adpater or you can just buy the new Shindandango"
You "Great"
In short - I like the idea of how Hardrives had increased in Storage capacity AND gone down in price, but they still fit the same slots
Ave Molech Setting
Something like this ALWAYS comes out in $current_ quarter + 3.
A Certified WaporWare Candidate
From the StorCard Technology page:
The StorCard conforms to ISO 7816-1 (Smart Card standard) including mechanical flexibility along the longitudinal and transverse axis without damage to the IC or the magnetic recording medium. The communication protocol is per the standard Smart Card Interface (ISO 7816-2 & 3) and via a unique bus implemented in the StorReader. ISO 7816 communication speed is 9600 baud, while the StorReader supports a sustained data transfer rate of 5 megabytes per second in the 100 megabyte StorCard, and scales in the 5 gigabyte design.
Looks like it is going to be smartcard compatable and adequately flexable.
This will rock, assuming it's got the reliability that Castlewood's ORB drive lacks (the last "great" removable innovation).
:-\
Anyone want to buy a mostly-dead ORB and handful of disks?
- chrish
It's called competition.
Everyone should remember this the next time they feel the urge to crap on about monopolies.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
it can use the ata interface or pc card interface
s /M K5002mpl-Over.shtml
http://www.toshiba.com/taissdd/products/feature
At $15 a card, how much of our personal information will we be forced to carry around in our pockets?
Change that to "could" and the answer becomes "all of it". B-(
But who cares the size of the card? Ten decimal digits (plus a few for population growth and aliases) is enough for a unique identifier for everybody. With the cops wired they can access a government database of any desired size in real-time.
So why put the info on a $15 card that YOU carry around with you - and potentially could read or even modify - when they could just give you a $0.02 piece of plastic with a number and have the same "benefits" (to them) without the "risks"?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
so 1950's. I see no reason why in this day and age a computer should have any moving parts, except maybe a fan for cooling. This technology is not the future, I see something more along the lines of Compact Flash as the price comes down. I mean think about it, why does a hard drive need to consist of circular disks that rotate? It doesn't. It just seems like innovation has become stuck in a groove, like the record player technology that preceded this. Someone go and push the needle a little bit so we can move on.
Erm. Mylar is also what film (as in what goes through the projector at your local megaplex) headers are made of (the actual film is usually polyester).
Some speakers have their active surface made of Mylar.
Light, yes. Flimsy, not necessarily.
This is like right on the borderline between being a possible product, and being yet another vapor storage product scam.
The line about its being as durable as a regular credit card seems like BS. If you've got a moving spindle in there, it's not going to be very good at handling being flexed.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Privacy violation is already real and there is nothing delicate about it. When the information is available, it will be abused.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I know Redundent, But:
%s/Credit Card sized 5GB HD to arrive late this year/Credit Card sized 100MB HD to arrive late this year/g
5 Gig maybe in 2005 if the company is one of the
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Sure, they're flexible, but what happens when I have a condom ring imprint in my StorCard?
Man the poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.
-Springsteen
Because the MPAA/RIAA lawyers are going to have a hayday with this.
Has anyone else caught the fact it sounds like a really big Zip drive. Does anyone else remember the joys of zip drive ownership? Your data is about as safe as a fresh baked pie on a windowsill at a fat farm.
so i have a few questions:
i do a lot of music recording with computers, so could these drive work well for that type of application? is it usb 1.1 or usb 2.0? what is the sustain throughput? I mean if these things work like normal fast hardrive then they would be a god send to teh music recording community. And since they are usb connected, can they be setup in a raid fassion to allow for multi-track recordings?
I agree with your numbers, but DVDs aren't HDTV. HDTV is 720 vertical lines minimum. DVDs are 480 lines.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
wouldn't that make it a "floppy" disk then. They weren't always 1.44 MB, so I don't think size is what determines the name.
When are these storage companies going to learn lesson, that they need to cooperate, need good standard, broad industry support for a new device to succeed? So far the most successful is CompactFlash, CD, floppy and DVD. Not necessarily anyone of them is due to technical superiority alone (except CD. they were technically way ahead of any alternative available then). CF succeeded due to PCMCIA compatibility. DVD had its share of success due to CD compatibility (not many people would have bought DVD drive in their computer, if that couldn't play CDs). Floppies had huge industry support.
Lets see - a thin mylar platter spinning inside a thin envelope. Not very hard, is it? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to call that a floppy disk?
toshiba pc card type II 5GB drive
the history of the world
It will actually take 3 years, cost too much and deliver only half of the capacity.
Has anyone noticed yet that these are not 5GB hard disks, but by definition classify as floppy disks? This has been too long in coming. Hope they're not prohibitively expensive like ZIP disks are.
Ok this thing has a Mylar disk right? Well that's what floppies have. A Floppy disk is made from a plastic film which is Mylar. This is covered in a thin layer of a magnetic material. With 3.5" it is incased in a hard plastic shell. This card has a hard plastic shell, sure the article also said that the card had integrated circuitry for encryption, but that doesn't make it a hard drive. SO.... the real question is what technology are they using to squeeze that much data onto a mylar disk that is smaller than the Mylar disk in a floppy drive.
I've not poured over the entire website or related articles, but the "StorReader" for under $100 sounds a bit fishy. Will we need a seperate device for writing data to these little disks?
No Time To Lose!
No-time Toulouse!
Don't we have 20gb PCMCIA hard drives already? While they're not exactly as THIN as a credit card, they're pretty darn close. FYI, Apple uses PCMCIA hard drives in their iPods.
If the $100 price is only for the 100mb version, you're better off getting a USB disk-on-key.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Just have a RAID 5 reader/drive. Have 10-20 of these to get 50-100GB for now and I'm sure more in the future.
They appear to use less electricity so that would be a plus over my 3/80GB HD RAID 5 in my server.
Well, for that matter anyone rememer the quarter sized hard drive in several men's magazines a couple years ago that were gonna make the "personal computer" into a wearable form? What happened to those cause i wanna make a computer in a luchbox and still have room for my lunch!
Awh crap... I forgot to remove my wallet before
sitting down!
...it probably is :(
Actually, dataplay was just fine technically. I've got one sitting right next to me and it works great. They're really tiny, and the really do hold 500MB. It's the DRM crap that killed it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Thanks. I was in a rush, and posted one of the first links that Google came up with for "Mylar Speaker". :o)
all over again. but smaller, and higher capacity. cool. those things were indestructible.
...but this sounds a lot like a floppy drive to me. Requires a reader ( = Drive), into which you insert your "card" ( = disk).
I am alone, yet I also surf the universal backwash of undifferentiated Being, which is LOVE.
I wonder which is actually cheaper to make, this or flash memory. We can get CF cards of at least 1GB now, maybe 2GB. The new Fuji/Olympus flash format (XD?) will supposedly surpass CF. It seems to me that flash memory, with no moving parts, etc., would be cheaper to make, not to mention more robust, and faster. So I wonder what this thing is really all about -- DRM, maybe? Big profits from selling the little reader things?
"honey I stuck your smartcard on the fridge with the bills"
@$%#!
What about this built into a celphone-pda. I've always said that I would buy one of those when they get at least 5 megs of storage for MP3's. This would help reduce techno-clutter, and make life a little easeir
But the *perceived* marketing problem with using two dual-layered discs is that the viewer will have to get up and switch discs in the middle of the movie. Of course, you can alleviate this with a multi-dvd jukebox.
The bigger question I have is about the DVD-18. Can most players read both sides of the DVD-18 without having the user physically flip the disc?
Once you have this in all your cards what next? Keys? Soon your wallet will be too heavy to carry. Not very Efficent. Might as well use your laptop now.
imagine the cost to repair or recover data from such a drive.
You shouldn't need to prove your medical condition to get drugs to treat it. Competent people should be treated like adults and allowed to make informed decisions about their own bodies, without government interference. (The incompetent shouldn't be allowed to leave home in the first place.)
Sound like the Quantum Bigfoot version of the microdrive, IMHO.
Read the FSCKing Linked Article:
StorCard promises the tiny hard drive will provide high performance to quickly handle large amounts of data. It will support a volume sufficient to stream media files, for example, according to Heil. As a result, the StorCard could store even material that previously would fit only on a DVD.
that comes straight from the article.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
I know, what I meant was DVD-quality at HDTV resolutions...
is this a multiple choice type thing? if it is, i'm complaining about the options. theres no "cmdrtaco is a wanker" there.
"Some of the bills were ON my smart card!"
Oh fscking @$%#!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The main point has IMHO not been raised in this thread, although infrequently discussed on these pages before: Should you not have a say in how your personal information is used? Should information on everything about you and your life be out of your control? I suggest that the question is not about whether you lead an impeccable life, and should therefore not worry about others learning your secrets, or not. No, the question is, should you not be free, to some degree, to decide for yourself what of your personal information is disseminated and to whom? Should you not have the basic right to live free from prying eyes, to some 'reasonable' level, if you so choose?
Ultimately, is privacy not a human right? This is the pressing question, and it begs an answer.
I don't really get it. You've got a couple companies with a shit-ton of cash, none of which they want to give to you. (Promises, sure. They'll blow smoke up your ass about you being the next DVD format all day. But cash? No.) Or you've got a shit-ton of people with no shortage of cash, who wont give you the time of day if you pay attention to the aforementioned companies, but who will be more than happy to rain lots of money upon you if you give sell them what they would like to buy.
I mean, it's not like this story hasn't been played out before. Look at Dataplay. Gigabyte on a quarter. Tech's out now. Wrapped up in DRM.
DOA.
More CD-R's will be purchased in the next thirty seconds than Dataplay discs will be before they're pulled off the market. They wish I was exaggerating.
Seems to me that all DRM buys you is bankruptcy...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The thing is HDTV is normally ~19Mbps. I can be done with less (I have seen it as low as 12), but compression artifacts start becoming substantial.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
That's neat and all, but when do they expect to come with a *writer*? CDs didn't really become useful to me until I could write them myself.
On the other hand, if this is a medium that requires a lot of special hardware to write the card information, it wouldn't surprise me to see music being released on these. Wouldn't that be a natural progression for the RIAA? If the bought the rights to this technology, then only released drivers that did output straight to the speakers, they could control how easy it is to copy the music. Yeah, sure, you could run the output to another computer input and record the music, but the digital to analog to digital conversion will degrade the quality of the recording, etc., etc.
Music and video equipment manufacturers would jump on the bandwagon looking for some reason to convince consumers to dump those out of date, bulky DVD readers and step up to the new and improved Card Readers. Selling point: you could fit the [insert favority group here]'s entire collection onto a single card!
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
A certain monk had a habit of pestering the Grand Tortue (the only one who
had ever reached the Enlightenment 'Yond Enlightenment), by asking whether
various objects had Buddha-nature or not. To such a question Tortue
invariably sat silent. The monk had already asked about a bean, a lake,
and a moonlit night. One day he brought to Tortue a piece of string, and
asked the same question. In reply, the Grand Tortue grasped the loop
between his feet and, with a few simple manipulations, created a complex
string which he proferred wordlessly to the monk. At that moment, the monk
was enlightened.
From then on, the monk did not bother Tortue. Instead, he made string after
string by Tortue's method; and he passed the method on to his own disciples,
who passed it on to theirs.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...