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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."
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 ..
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.
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
If they already know it's going to become late why don't they just push back the release date?
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.
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
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.
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
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...
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
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
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.
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.
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 ???
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.
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!
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!!!!
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 ?