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. ;)

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?

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.