Cheap New 1 Inch HDD Holds 1.5GB

SlightlyMadman writes "Cornice, Inc. has unveiled a new alternative for small devices requiring large amounts of storage. With an expected OEM price of about $100, it blows the smaller microdrive out of the water (at least until this fall). The days of cramming bulky 2.5" disks into mp3 players may finally be over."

Comments

Forget MP3 Players

[levik]

I can't wait to have these start appearing in all sorts of Palm devices. The processors and screens of these guys have long caught up to the PC's of min 90's, but the sotrage capacities have been hovering around late 80's levels with the micro-drives being too large to fit in.

Finally we may see a handheld where storage is not a limited factor.

Another good application would be digital cameras.

Re:Forget MP3 Players

[Baka No Wookie]

Perhaps this would be a great opportunity to explore and research the use of solar technology with PDA's.

Re:Forget MP3 Players

[levik]

For most high-end color devices, it's already there. This is not really too big a deal - the high end PDAs come with cradles that people make a habit of sticking them into every night. Nobody really bitches about the fact that their cell phones need to be charged every evening after work.

Face it, how often is it that you're away from any outlet for over 24 hours? The few people that have these situations can splurge for a replacement battery/addon battery pack/solar panel/hand crank/whatever.

Re:Forget MP3 Players

[evilviper]

Finally we may see a handheld where storage is not a limited factor.

Say what now? 1.5GB, and storage is now not a factor?

First of all, that's not very big. Second, CF cards bigger than that have been around for quit some time, so you could already have had a handheld with more capacity than what you MIGHT, EVENTUALLY, see. And finally, solid-state is much lower power.

Hmm, you know, you might be right. Once these hard drives are in handhelds, the batteries will be dead so quickly that batteries will be the limiting factor, not the storage.

Re:Forget MP3 Players

[LePrince]

I already do all this with a device called a laptop computer.

A Palm is devised to be a small, efficient organiser, with some apps to help you do some basic tasks. No, I don't want to watch the simpsons on a 3 inches screen. I want to watch it on my 15 inches laptop screen. My PDA is used to keep my life organised, and make it so that if I go on a 2 weeks trip I don't even have to recharge it (same reason why I don't buy color PDAs, it sucks too much battery). Want to input faster on your PDA ? Well, if you REALLY need to, they have some external keyboards. But I can input really fast using my laptop...

I tell you, my Palm has 8 megs of memory, and I don't need more. It's really enough for some little games, get my news with AvantGo, and a couple of offline webpages with Plucker. So why a gig in my Palm, when I can get 30 in my laptop with a much bigger screen for all multimedia purposes ?

Re:Forget MP3 Players

[RealErmine]

Adding a hard disk to a palm device would bring the length of time between charges down to daily, not acceptable. :(

Huh? Do you sleep once a day? Can't you cradle your palm (so to speak) each night before you go to bed? What the heck? Maybe you were confused when you wrote that.

I hear that the new iPod firmware brings it back up to 10 hours of standby per charge and it's drive probably uses more power than this 1" one. That's not good enough for damn near everybody?

It's fine IF....

[binaryDigit]

you don't mind proprietary interfaces. I wonder how many /.'ers will pipe up and dismiss this tech since it doesn't support ATA (or anything else).

OR will they say, hey, it's fine for it's purpose and it's intended host is probably going to be something that you can't upgrade anyway (i.e. throwaway) so who cares? In either case it's a different market specialization than the micro drive.

Anyway, one thing they don't mention is the performance specs. What is the throughput of this technology? If it's designed to be low powered (which you would assume given it's intended usage), how long does it take for the drive to spin up, etc. Often when you simplify you get better mtbf (fewer things to fail), however with their push to produce a cheaper drive, will reliability suffer?

Re:Interface

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how difficult it would be to stick one into a CF card and make it compatible though.

Benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can find 512 MB flash cards now for about $100
and the price is dropping by at least a factor of two every 10 months.

I don't see why anyone would buy this. It is sure to draw more current than a flash card, will likely not be as shock resistant, and it is not meant to be removable. No more easily transfering files between you're camera/mp3 player with a cheap USB flash reader.

The only advantage may be in access speed, althoug flash cards are plenty fast for MP3 playback and camera use.

So why get this?

Re:Benefit?

[stratjakt]

These will get cheaper over time too, so it'll probably lead to super-cheap mp3 players/digicams and the like in the future, with an embedded gig or two, and maybe make CF or something an option for expansion.

They have a ton of embedded applications, from rackmounted equipment (0.5u servers?), or even the next Gameboy - or maybe even the current GBA (price comes down and have a 1.5 gig HDD inside a GBA Cart? That'd make for some cool games)

Re:Benefit?

[CatOne]

I'm not so sure about that. I've heard the OTHER side of the coin -- namely that professional photographers PREFER multiple, smaller cards. That way if "something bad happens" they lose the photos on that particular (say, 256 MB) card, but not *all* of them. The photographer at my sister's wedding this past weekend was using a Fuji FinePix S2 Pro, and he had a belt full of CF cards -- probably 10 or 12 of them at least. They were all smaller CF cards (at least the couple I could read were 256).

Re:Benefit?

[TheGratefulNet]

my response to that is: digital wallet. there are neat toys that you insert a CF into a slot, press a single button and it creates a new dir and copies the files to it. you use a 2.5" drive in that 'wallet' and then you can init the flash card and reuse it. in fact, you usually double buffer - you have one card in the camera and another being dumped to hard disk. I have such a 'wallet' and its pretty cool. you can even dump the card twice (2 unique dirs) if you are that paranoid.

and if you're REALLY paranoid, you ALWAYS shoot film as well as digital. I do, and I'm not even a pro/working-for-a-living photog - just an enthusiast who knows a bit about the field.

Consider the alternative

[Christopher Bibbs]

If I could have 1.5GB of memory in my digital camera for $100, it'd be a done deal. As is, CompactFlash memory is around $50 for 256MB so I'd have to buy six cards which will cost more and be a greater hassle. Even the MicroDrives are $200 for 1GB. I think 1GB is really close to the sweet spot for digital photos. Very few people will need any more than that on a vacation. MP3's on the other hand, I think 100GB is closer to what is right.

Re:Consider the alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need 100GB for MP3s, you probably have the "Write-Only Syndrome" where you download music/movies/programs to add them to your collection, but never actually listen/use/watch them (well maybe once). While it's your right to do this, you have to admit that you don't really *NEED* all that space.

The point of having such a massive library is so that lets say you think of a song or band you want to listen to. You probably don't even know whether you have it or not, so you do a search of your collection for it. Rather than do a Kazaa search, search your own collection, you just might have what you are looking for.

Re:Consider the alternative

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

QEMM? Pah! Some of us manually editied out config.sys files and autoexec.bat files

Did that too... himem.sys and emm386.exe with all the tweaked options. Fun stuff. QEMM 386 was great because it had tons of colorfull, complex, and completely useless (for a 12 year old, anyway) screens to stare at and run tests again and again. Crazy. I think the test of a true hard core geek is to see if he/she gets mesmerized by watching the GUI of a hard drive degragging program. I used to stare at that thing like moths to a blue light. Ahh... memories of BBS's and ZModem and leechin' files and checking .nfo's.

So, where is the RAID chip, huh?

[LibertineR]

Actually this thing is pretty cool. However, I am not too keen on a lot of movable(breakable) parts to insure my access to pictures in my digital cameras. For cameras, I think it is best to stick with solid-state memory. I cant imagine anyone being able to do data recovery on one of these things.

Were I shooting someone's wedding, there would be hell to pay if I came to them and said the DISK CRASHED, and their pictures are kaput. No, I think I will stick with flash memory, and let some other sucker iron out the kinks.

Re:Dad Gummit!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I am still wary of those things. They have to be treated very gently. I've read that just the act of putting some pressure on the center of the larger faces of the drives can kill them.

I'd rather stick to a "bulky" 2.5" MD or mini-CD, which I've never personally damaged media or players of either format.

No CF2, No dice

[agslashdot]

The compact flash marketplace is huge. Just about every digital camera requires and supports CF2, and the IBM microdrive is the only HD fitting in that slot that offers 1GB capacity. By choosing to ditch CF2, I don't see these guys having much of a chance. Do you seriously expect Nikon and Canon and every other big fish in the camera market who have finally agreed to settle on CF2 to now support this new harddisk without CF2 ?

Is this a hoax? Where's the Cornice web site?

[writertype]

Unless my Google powers are sadly lacking (and it's a possibility; I stopped clicking after the third page of results) I fail to see how this story has been proved to be legitimate. Yes, Nikkei reported it, but you would think a company with intentions to be a real player would at least have a web site. The only mention I can find of Cornice on the 'net is a circular chain of stories, all linking back to the Nikkei piece.

Re:Video iPod...

[Dylan Zimmerman]

I believe that he said "video iPod". The Archos is no iPod by any stretch of the imagination. Consider, the iPod has only 5 buttons, a wheel, and a hold switch.

Now, I will admit that I haven't seen many Archos products in person, but the only Archos Jukebox that I _have_ seen had easily a dozen buttons. It's screen was also significantly smaller than the iPod's and it's backlight was dimmer.

I love my iPod. If Apple made one that could play and record videos (think pocket PVR), I'd have it as soon as it came out. And really, that isn't too unrealistic. IIRC, Intel has a technique that lets them put inductors into ICs. Just pay Intel for that technology and then build a one-chip tuner. Double the thickness of the iPod for an extra battery and the tuner/output circuitry and you have a PVR that can fit in your pocket.

Some awesome uses..

[g8way]

Instead of trying to use this like a CompactFlash, like most of you would like to do, you could embed this into, say, a PDA. You could replace the usual 64mb flash that comes with them, to possibly eliminate the need for extra power hogging storage devices.. Maybe someone should embed this into a cd player so you can record your cds to it, and not have to fumble with them again (before the government outlaws the device because everyone rips their friend's cds)