Slashdot Mirror
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 ..
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
Not necessarily true now, either. The article says that media will be available from 100MB up to 5GB. Any takers that it's the 100MB card that sells for $15 with the 5GB "model" going for several hundred?
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
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
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.
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
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
I usually appreciate your insight, but this is not one of your better trolls. Mylar is so light it's used to make solar sails, but so flimsy they have to deploy it in space, becase gravity will tear it. I don't think you'll be able to spin the disc ("platter"?) fast enough to gain significant rotational inertia.
funny munging
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.
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.
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.