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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?
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/
"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."
Because it's cool goddamnit!
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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,
"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
Well I do!
Long live P2P!
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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
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.
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
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.
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.
--
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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
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?
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