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1.5GB HDs On a 1" Platter
darthv506 was among several to point out a Cnet story describing a new "1.5GB HD on a 1" Platter. Samsung is releasing a sub 600 buck video camera that is "Smaller than a pack of cigarettes" featuring the drive. The drive is actually in production, and apparently goes for $65 in volume.
The story says it is a 5GB drive on a 1.5" platter. Maybe posters should read the article.
The main thing here is that this is normal hard-drive type technology just with higher density, probably lower power consumption as well (still reading article). This makes it much more economical then a Flash drive of equivelent size. Note that in the write-up a cost of $65 in quantity is much cheaper then flash drives.
"The Longmont, Colo.-based start-up has developed a 1.5GB, 1-inch diameter hard drive"
"At 1.5GB, the Cornice-based devices"
hm...
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http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/15/151
Price: 200 some dollars versus 65 (soon to be 50)
Check out this article for a quick lowdown. Several areas seem to have taken this approach -- Englewood, CO, has a thriving tech center, as well.
Erm, no.
USB2.0 or Firewire both have plenty enough bandwidth to saturate the drive. Cornice drives manage well excess of 3MBytes/sec in my experience (I work for Rio), which is faster than I've ever seen from my 1GB microdrive plugged into a PCMCIA-CF adaptor.
Remember USB2.0/Firewire can support up to in excess of 30MBytes/sec. This is faster than a CF interface can manage - CF doesn't have DMA capability.
Hugo
both I think... a 1" 1.5 gb drive coming soon and a 1.5" 5 gb drive that is already in production.
It's surface mount, i.e. fixed, i.e. non-removable (unless mounted in a compact flash sized shell). It's got a minimalistic shell to reduce price --that's the point; it can be installed in cheap cameras.
Give it a few years (yeah, yeah, I know you've already been waiting) You're more likely to see these as the transition to optical computing takes place in , well, a couple of decades.
How is that any better than a tape recorder?
you can record 10,000 hours of minimal-quality audio? Silence takes up just as much space on tape as sound does, not so with decent digital encoding.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
If they are NPR news shows you can download any of them for free already.
If the show is syndicated and not available online for free, you really should just ante-up and buy tapes to support it don't you think?
Already exists since the 1st of june 2003 when ARCHOS offcialy launched the new AV300 series :
;)
mp3, divx, photos, camera, video shoot & playback, tv recorder & playback, radio, speech/radio/mp3 recorder (some need modules), 3.8 inches screen, USB2/Firewire for a "few" 800 buck.
oh... forgot, it's 20Gb and 40Go in a few months.
Not yet in stores however or already in shortage ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Some specs:
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
The differences between these two products:
- Hitachi is more expensive, more parts, requires more power
- Cornice is more 'dumb', less capacity, smaller (mounted to PCB) and non-removable
So they each have their advantages. I don't know if I could be satisfied with being unable to 'change tapes' in my camcorder - it probably takes on the order of minutes to transfer from the camera to a computer or other storage device, and I doubt the drive has enough throughput and a low enough seek time to allow both high speed recording and high speed reading which would allow me to offload portions of the data while still recording.But not owning a camcorder I don't know what the usage patterns typically are. I imagine that most days it's used it isn't used for more than an hour throughout the whole day. At this point the MPEG4 encoder may require more power then the HD, which means that a very small li-ion polymer battery will last through the entire drive.
-Adam
Yah.. These were designed by scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
"Scientists in the lab discovered a way to manipulate the crystal's structure with lasers and store data three-dimensionally in holograms within the crystal's volume. The greatest benefit of holographic storage is that huge amounts of data locked in the crystal matrix can be accessed instantaneously. The iron-doped lithium niobate crystals are grayish in color and the size of Las Vegas dice. Although still in the experimental stage, they may one day replace hard drive platters as a storage medium."
also:
"The only rewritable material that could replace a hard drive is single-crystal lithium niobate, and writing to it requires an argon-ion laser that's about 4 feet long and weighs 10 pounds. But the real reason Kryder has doubts about holographic storage is because regular old hard-drive technology may make it unnecessary. Using new materials and magnetizing methods, he believes that a one-terabyte (1000GB) notebook hard drive could be a reality in five to six years."
(both quotes from pcworld.com articles)
Take a look at some of the pictures of the prototypes and much more technical information HERE
When they get to some MP3 or Vorbis streaming, let me know.
WAMU, the Washington D.C. NPR station does MP3 streaming.
I work at Circuit City and I just sold a lady a higher end Sony 1MP MiniDV camcorder today for $799. The memory stick that was included was 8 MB, so this would be a bit of a step up. Still, if you're buying something for stills, you don't want a 1 MP camera.
So, yeah, with 14fps and 1MP each, you're looking at about 3 minutes and 15 seconds of record time, if I didn't drop a zero somewhere. Not too great, is it?
barzelay.net
Beyond the speed of the interface itself, there are two issues with actual "CompactFlash" storage (as opposed to CF-form factor spindles):
- Flash memory has a relatively low sustained write speed of 3MB/s (for 20X CF storage.)
- Flash memory has a limited (1 million cycles) re-write lifetime, strongly affected by the operating temperature.
Neither of these limitations are all that critical for a still camera, but can pose a real problem for a camcorder.I ran up against both of these limits while working out the issues of booting and running a firewall (OpenBSD on AMD) using only flash storage.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.