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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...
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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...
"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
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 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.
this can be possible, remember paper?
you could write something on it and then even after you folded it, you could still read it...
that stuff was the bomb...
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.
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 ???
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.
Spinning wheel of mylar?
That is a floppy folks, not a hard drive.
Grammer odd not, I think.
-yoda.
"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).
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.
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. :-)
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."
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!
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.
A great name is self-describing. With "StorCard", we know its purpose (Storage) and its shape and size (Card). At two syllables, it's also easy to pronounce (think "Pepsi" and "Ajax").
With Pepsi we know that it is brisk and full of energy (Pep) and a positive thing for Spanish speaking people (si) so it is a source of positive energy (or a positive source of energy?) for Spaniards and Mexicans.
With Ajax we know that it is singular (A) and yet contains a plurality of small objects used in a child's game (jax) and is a wonderful way to consolidate scattered pieces into one cohesive unit. That's why moms love Ajax.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
---But that price isn't bad compared to ( much more reliable ) ZIP disks..
I only need say 1 word to refute the "Reliablity of Zip disks".......
Click.