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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 $15 each, Heil says.
The StorCard and StorReader are scheduled to become available in the second half of 2003."
According to the storcard website these cards have a datarate of 5Mbytes/sec the rotational speed is 3600 rpm and the average access time is 15 msec. All taken from the overview of the StorCard from the campany website.
This site mentions a 5Mb/s transfer rate which I guess would be more than enough for DVD movies.
However, it says that this figure is for the 100Mb version and that it "scales" to the 5Gb version. What does that mean, I wonder? It will be 50 times faster for the 5Gb version? I don't think so, somehow - 50 times slower? That might be pushing it for DVD usage at 100Mb/sec..
Q.
so how durable is this unit going to be? If you drop it is it going to be unreadable? What about heat? If you leave your wallet in the winshield with one of these things is it going to mess up the data? Did anyone do any stress tests on these things?
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
They have a very interesting white paper explaining how they`ve managed to make HD compliant disk without having it in an airtight sealed container. Clever stuff.
"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late." "Late?" said Arthur. "What for?" "What is your name, human?" "Dent. Arthur Dent," said Arthur. "Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly. "It's a sort of threat you see." Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes. "I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."
are available here.
Well, at least some of the juicy technical details.
Well, at least it references an ISO standard (ISO 7816).
Not necessarily a better solution, but you could buy:
1 USB CF reader (~20$)
1 512mb CF card (~140$)
Of course, it doesn't have the same form factor as the USB keychain, but you would have data portability... and you could buy extra cards for more storage.
Of course, it's still more expensive than a CD-R.....
Karnal
From StorCard.com: The StorCard has the flexibility and form factor of a credit card and conforms to ISO 7816-1 including mechanical flexibility along the longitudinal and transverse axis without damage to the IC or the magnetic recording medium.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
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. :-)
Sure, the StorCard and the floppy have the same medium (Mylar disk), but StorCard's is apparently formatted different. Also note the 3600 rpm of the StorCard, while a floppy has what, 600 or 700 rpm? This thing is faster, stores more, and is dirt cheap for what you get.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
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
Picking nits here, i know, but rotational inertia is a property of the object (I=(MR^2)/2 i think,) Angular momentum depends on the rotational speed, (L=I*omega) not the moment of inertia itself.
Rotational intertia (or, as I've always heard it called, the moment of inertia) is indeed a property of the object, just like mass is a property of an object. Its value depends on how the mass is arranged, though -- a solid disk and a hoop which both have the same mass and radius don't have the same moment of inertia.
You're right that angular momentum depends on rotational speed (omega), but it also depends on the moment of inertia. That's the I in your formula.
Nevertheless, as another poster pointed out, the mylar disc is small (moment of inertia goes up as you put more mass further away from the rotational center) and lightweight, so angular momentum effects will undoubtedly be tiny.
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.
You're wrong. Well, you're right if you're talking about DVD-R which has a maximum capacity of 4.7GB but pressed DVDs can contain a LOT more (up to 17GB), considering they can be multilayered and double-sided whereas DVD-Rs are only SL/SS (Single Side/Single Layer).
Here's a table representing the various combinations and respective capacities (googled the info from this page):
DVD-5 (SS/SL): 4.38 gig (4.7G) of data, over 2 hours of video
DVD-9 (SS/DL): 7.95 gig (8.5G), about 4 hours of video
DVD-10 (DS/SL): 8.75 gig (9.4G), about 4.5 hours of video
DVD-14 (DS/ML): 12.33 gig (13.24G), about 6.5 hours of video
DVD-18 (DS/DL): 15.90 gig (17G), over 8 hours of video
DVD-RAM (SS/SL): 2.40 gig (2.58G)
DVD-RAM (DS/SL): 4.80 gig (5.16G)
As you can see, we'll have to wait a bit more for a solid-state competitor to the DVD...
Cheers,
max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
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.