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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 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.
"A reduction in components cuts costs. The 1.5-inch 5GB drive, which has been in volume manufacturing since mid-April, sells for $65 in quantities of 10,000. The company is aiming for $50, Magenis said. By contrast, existing standard 1-inch Microdrives from IBM sell for $219 at retail or more, while 1GB flash cards go for around $200."
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
That's an error in the article. According to Cornice's website, It's a 1.5GB drive.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
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