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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.
This seem to be the perfect size (capacity and physical) for a Radio Tivo project...
Mike
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!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think I lost my hard drive in my pocket!
This seems to be great, as long as they're more reliable than Maxtors.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
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?
The story says it is a 5GB drive on a 1.5" platter. Maybe posters should read the article.
Really. Price Currently these cost $65 with a target price of $50. Flash drives cost $200 or more. These drives also have less moving parts, and save space by removing un-needed stuff (Like drive rails; these drives are surface mounted).
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.
These ones go to eleven.
-n
http://www.remix.net/
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.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
hm...
4 24 6&mode=nested&tid=137
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/15/151
Because it's cool goddamnit!
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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..
Trolling is a art,
These drives aren't meant to be removed from the device they are installed in, so data transfer is limited to firewire. I'd prefer a MicroDrive. It can be removed and used as a removable drive by any device with a Compact Flash reader. Much more useful, and supposedly a 4GB version is available later this year. This item will be used only in low end products where price outweighs features. Any device I can think of that can store that much data, eventually you'd want to be able to transfer it somewhere else.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
"Smaller than a pack of cigarettes"
That those big giant cigarettes packets like these?
Umm, the IBM/Hitachi Microdrive is a hard drive, not a flash drive. It just happens to be the same size (about one inch) and have the same interface as a Compact Flash type 2 card.
Being a mechanical device, the Microdrive draws more power and is more fragile than a flash card. Its main attraction used to be high capacity, but Compact Flash is rapidly catching up.
There's a 4 GB version of the Microdrive coming this fall, says Steve's Digicams
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.
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 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.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The gb/volume ratio wouldn't be much better
You'd need to create 5 1/4" platters for a *very* small market.
You can change a failed disk in an array much easier than a failed platter inside a hermetically sealed HDD.
Size = IDE (RAID)
Speed = SCSI (RAID)
Really fucking huge? Not sure. Big array? Tape robot? Fibre SCSI?
However, considering you can fit 1TB (4x250gb WD drives) in a desktop now, I don't see that many needing it...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Wait, has anyone seen the new Ipods? They're LESS than an inch thick, and can store up to 30 GB on them! What's the big hurrah about these things??
That's great news for the hidden camera 'voyeur' pr0n fetish.
I can fit 6 in the bathroom, and she'll never even notice.
Gee, can we boot Linux on it?
But Seriously, Folks, this kind of storage addresses one of the major problems with memory stick-based still cameras: too much $, too few pictures. Say that a camera with this disk only stores 100 or so 10 MByte pictures and then needs a few minutes to D/L them to a bigger box via USB; that STILL compares well with film cameras (36-exposure rolls), and is MUCH more convenient than a CD-R on the back of the camera (seen'em, not impressed, they're bulkier than my SLR and have no interchangeable lenses). And it's inexpensive. Nice engineering job, great toy!
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Samsung is releasing a sub 600 buck video camera that is "Smaller than a pack of cigarettes"
Smaller, and cheaper too!
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
Energy savings
Density also will increase, Magenis said. Along with stripping out parts, the company has worked on engineering issues such as keeping energy consumption down. The RCA device will be able to run 12 hours on a single battery charge because the drive's motor shuts down between tasks, Magenis said. Shock-absorbing materials in the drive case will allow devices to sustain the shock from a 1-meter drop, he added.
Won't that be a bit taxing on the motor itself?
Informatus Technologicus
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
Lots of fuzz about cheap'n'small drives. Ok, how good are they ?
Are they reliable ? For years ?
I'd rather have a big 20Gb@$200 disk that lasts for atleast 7 years,
than a small cheap 200Gb$50 that might do down the drain in half a year.
--
http://osxonintel.xoverzero.com - sign the petition!
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
But on fragility, they are not as bad as people would think. Sure, they aren't the oops-I-ran-the-flash-through-the-laundry indestructible, but if you read the actual specs on how much shock it can take before causing data loss or how much more it takes to actually destroy the unit, you'll quickly realize that the camera surrounding the microdrive would be completely trashed before the drive would get damaged. Due to their large capacity, swapping is less frequent. Most of these things lives are inside a camera or in a camera bag.
If you are walking around with a $1,600 - $2,500 camera, you tend to be so careful with the thing, the drive inside is downright spoiled.
V
I also own the 4500, and I also use two 128MB cards (although I get about 105 pictures per card at the best jpeg format).
While the cards are quite large, and I would consider using fixed storage at around the 1GB mark (that's A LOT of pictures and when I travel, I edit out the crap every night, so I only keep what's good. 200 pictures gets me about 3 weeks to a month of continous vacation somewhere exotic), but here is the problem I see:
When I get a card with 100 pictures on it of places I'll likely never be again, I get a little worried. I start to keep it protected with my passport in hotels. I have plans so that if I get mugged and they want the camera I can inconspicuously slip out the card.
The camera can be replaced, but frequently the pictures cannot; I wouldn't want a camera with several thousand pictures saved up on it I guess. I'd rather swap cards.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
we have had ibm 1 gb 1" hd for ages. in that sense 1.5 gb 1" is only an evolutionary. however, the price point may be little attractive. at $65, it would compete with 512 MB compactflash.
samsung video camera using 1.5 gb hd is less interesting in a sense that they don't have comparable optical and video quality specs and if you take history as a reference, it will be a mediocre camcorder. panasonic is working on pro level camcorder with 6 CF cards, each upto 4 GB. a consumer version of this may be more interesting.
hitachi, which took over ibm microdive, plans to make 4 gb version before the end of the year. if they can make price down, it might succeed.
microdrive had only a partial success in the beginning when CF was very expensive. today, it looks like a solution in need of a problem. for mp3, the 1.8" factor is good enough (e.g. iPod) where you can get upto 30 gb. for cameras, you need lot more reliability that many people are dissatisfied with microdrives. for pda, 512 MB CF is more than enough. for camcorders, tapes provide reliability; dvd based camcorder provides direct archive and micro-dv (Sony) provide compactness. as much as i like the technology, i don't see where to fit it.
I'd be impressed if it was 3+GB, but 1.5? Use 1GB compact flash or some other form of solid state. It's heading towards 2GB soon, most likely. Who want's moving parts?
But that said, it does seem likely the capacity of these little suckers will go up, way faster than Flash, so it'll be worth it soon. But 1.5GB? It's too late to be impressive, kinda like... Don't make me say it.... Zip GIZZMO DRIVE! Remember when those seemed big?
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
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
Yeah, that's a good idea. In this day and age, no one would notice you pulling out a pack of smokes.
And then, after the crowd has finished with their nasty looks and *gagging* sounds, and the manager has told you there's no smoking within 16 miles of the place, and the bouncer has asked you to leave, and everyone stops looking directly at you, you can be sneaky.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
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.