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.

Comments

Radio-TiVo?

[sweeney37]

This seem to be the perfect size (capacity and physical) for a Radio Tivo project...

Mike

Re:Radio-TiVo?

[Surak]

Not necessarily for music. Sometimes you want to be able to listen to other kinds of radio programs. For instance, where I work, I can't seem to get NPR to tune in very well, so I can't exactly listen to some NPR programming that goes on during the day. But with a TiVo-like system for radio, I could *record* those NPR programs *at home* (where the reception is perfectly fine) and play them back later. Of course, this also means that I can listen to the day programs better at home, and give it my more-or-less undivided attention.

Another application would be live audio recording. Take your portable radio TiVo thing and add a mic and boom -- live recording of concerts (if you can sneak it in of course ;), or audio security, or set it up in a friend's apartment and spy on them. ;)

Re:Radio-TiVo?

[Triv]

YOu can do this now (sort of) with an audible.com account - download individual shows and listen to them on an mp3 player, or burn them to CD. They currently offer This American Life and Fresh Air (AFAIK, there may be more). Give it a look.

Triv

Let's hope they learner thier lesson...

[SuperKendall]

Some of Cornice's employees came from Dataplay, a once-promising mini-disc start-up.

Hopefully, they've figured out what went wrong there and will be more sucessful this time around...

Though a camera that you can't upgrade storage for (they talk about embedding the HD in products), I'm not so sure about. 1.5GB might be enough for most people, however that comes just as 4 and 5 MP cameras are becoming popular and will probably make 1.5gb seem a bit small!

Longmont Colorado...

[Anonymous Coward]

seems to have had HDD 'startups' since Hector was a pup. Maxtor is there, Seagate has/had a plant there, upptey-dump others as well. What is it about Longmont? Do the same people just hop from company to company, recycling their skills with each new startup, persevering as each one cycles through some form of bankruptcy and renewal?

Which is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

1.5 GB drive or 1.5" 5 GB drive???

The article calls it both. If it's a 5 GB drive, I want one for my Nikon. If it's 1.5 GB, I think I'll wait a while. I already have a 1 GB microdrive.

Great reporting, Cnet!

Surface Mount

[Rosonowski]

It says that the drive is missing rails and is surface mounted. Does this mean it is lacking in some sort of shell? If so, it would make the drives severely lacking in upgrade possibilities.

Please use this for an MP3 player

[CastrTroy]

This is the kind of technology that should be used for portable mp3 players. Nobody needs to carry 20 gigs of music around in their pocket. I don't even have that much music. I would seriously like to see this technology make a small mp3 solution with adequate storage cost effective for everyone. The only current things on the market seem to be the ultra expensive ala iPod, or inadequate storage capacity ala solid state memory players. This could be the solution i'm sure we're all looking for.

Gigs ang gigs..

[grub]

Serious question: Why don't they go back to 5.25" full height drives with many platters for archival purposes? The speed would likely suck as the heads would need to move a lot from inner to outer edges but the capacity could be huge..

Re:Gigs ang gigs..

[MarcQuadra]

Remember the BigFoot series of hard drive? They were 5.25" drives by Quantum (now Maxtor) for desktop use. The problem is that when you make the disc wider, you have to slow down the rotation to keep the platters from breaking or 'stretching'. You'd have to run the things at 5400 RPM _AND_ a 'front to back' head seek would take forever. These would be GREAT as backup-only drives, but companies that buy backupd drives now are willing to pay $BIG_MONEY for backup drives (the bank I work at uses 36GB 10K U160-SCSI for server archives). There's really no market for cheap slow drives that hold oodles of data, they exist and don't sell well. Also, they'd end up in low-end PCs for sure, your uncle's eMachine would CRAWL with one of these.

News?

[Groote Ka]

I thought I've read this before a few days ago... here.

Well, nevermind. Funny to see that about seven to eigth years ago, everyone thought that HDDs had come to an end and that storage capacity per square centimeters is increasing even faster than Moore's Law.

Probably, HDDs will win over Flash as new IC processing technologies are getting exponentially expensive and HDD more and more power concious.

I should have studied magnetics instead of IC processing.

A video camera seems like an odd fit.

[ianscot]

I like the price and the size, but a camcorder seems like a weird place to use this -- unless it was just cheap enough to say "what the heck?" and go ahead, which'd be a really good sign for this drive.

A disk with 1.5 GB doesn't compete with DV tapes at all, so it can't be for the video. This is just replacing a flash card in that "cigarette pack"-sized camera to store stills you take along the way? Is this camcorder going to take stills much above 1.5MP? That's what the decent consumer camcorders that take stills are at -- and this one's a $600 camcorder, so it can't be that great. It'd take a looong while to fill 1.5 GB at that resolution.

Better laptops

[mnmn]

Smaller drives should cut energy uptake. With such a drive and a Transmeta, you could have a laptop that keeps going.

Even PDAs will benefit, since some people that are now using microdrives with PCMCIA cards see the battery go down in 2 hours or less.

I would buy a video camera that can save to removeable drives like these after a DivX or XVid encoding, even at a higher pricetag.

Re:Better laptops

[horza]

Smaller drives should cut energy uptake. With such a drive and a Transmeta, you could have a laptop that keeps going.

It would be a good complement to the main hard drive. You could put the OS (along with /swap and cache dirs) on the small hard drive, and let the main drive spin down for 99% of the time.

Phillip.

Re:ARCHOS does it all and more

[Zeinfeld]

Already exists since the 1st of june 2003 when ARCHOS offcialy launched the new AV300 series :

Yeah and it weighs a ton. You would not want to have an archos device built into a set of noise cancelling headphones. This drive should be lightweight enough to do that. 20Gb or 40Gb is not that big a deal, I find the critical size threshold is about 1Gb, thats the point at which I can get a decent selection of CDs on the device, enough for a plane trip. It is nice to be able to hold a complete collection of CDs, but I will happily trade that for a major saving in weight.

Hey manufacturers are you listening? Stick an MP3 player with a card slot in a pair of noise cancelling headphones, repeat C-A-R-D S-L-O-T, N-O-I-S-E C-A-N-C-E-L-L-I-N-G H-E-A-D-P-H-O-N--S

The bit I don't quite get is that the article implies that this is for embedding on a motherboard rather than for sale in a compactflash format. And the price advantage looks like it disappears when you get it in a removable format - $200 for a 1.5 Gb drive is not exactly an amazing advance. FlashRom is about the same price. I can get a 256Mb CompactFlash from Costco for $60.

The microdrive takes more power than flash rom is less mechanically robust and is available in more compact formats (like SD format). This does not sound like it will be much cheaper, so what is there to be excited about? [My statement on power is based on conversations with owners of Nikon D1 cameras who tell me that the microdrive tends to flatten the battery quicker than flash rom]

About the only area where this might be a big win is handheld PDAs, but even there the gap to compact flash may not be enough to be interesting.