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Toshiba Develops 0.85'' Hard Disk
onebuttonmouse writes "Toshiba have set a new record for the world's smallest hard disk at a tiny 0.85". Surely this will have some great applications in mobile devices, although the article does not mention power consumption. It'd be great if this made it into the iPod like the 1.5" Toshiba drive that resides in the current models."
It's not how big it is, it's how you use it...
SAILING MISHAP
It could benefit all hard drive based music players, not just the iPod.
For those in the UK; 0.85 Inches is a nice small 2.159cm. Although I wonder at the capacity and the sheilding from magnetic interference its going to need to keep away from even small magnetic currents erasing the data...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
I wonder how this will compete with Samsung's new one gigabyte (8 GBit) flash. With a storage capacity of only 2-3 GB, this drive is only 2 or 3 of these flash chips, so competing on size would be hard. Hopefully it's much cheaper.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
in such a small place...
God bless technology!
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
If any of you were wondering about "The 1-inch HDD developed by the US affiliate of Hitachi Ltd," that is the same as (what was) the IBM MicroDrive. IBM's hard drive section was purchased by Hitachi.
Also, it says that the Hitachi 1" hard drive was "released in November," but I know that the IBM MicroDrives have been around a lot longer than that. Maybe it's just that they shrunk a little and grew in capacity.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
...is that a Microdrive, which I believe is what they're referring to by "1 inch" hard disk drive is too large for cellphones, according to the article, but somehow, this .85 inch one isn't. That's not a huge difference in platter size. Is the associated electronic equipment in this one notably smaller? The article doesn't say, but that's the only thing I can think of-- .15 of an inch (that's shy of four millimeters for y'all metric folks) doesn't seem like it would be a deal-breaker.
Not that it really matters to me. As long as my phone has a vibrate mode, I don't think I want a hard disk in it...
This is great for seek times, high speed applications like watching hi-res movies from a hard drive this small could mean smooth tracking through the film without losing audio sync, a problem which affects larger drives (3.5").
Forget the iPod, this sort of drive would do nicely in a handheld/pocket divx player.
There is no god
Heh. Don't suppose there's a +1: Ironic, modifier there?
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
I'd love to see this used on a digital camera. Imagine 2 gig of sapce to space your 5 megapixel shots. mmmm Price might be prohibitive at first but what new technology isnt?
is only 2-3 gigabytes... the ones in ipods are at least 10, right? it sounds like they just reduced the size of the platters, and they didn't significantly increase the storage density.
Great so I can loose this sucker just like I keep loosing that tiny cell phone I had to buy. Or better yet they will prob combine the two and make the worlds smallest cell with a HD. So then I can loose both at the same time. How small do we need things, really. I thought women always say "size matters!" if so the geeks are going in the wrong direction.
It would be kind of cool to see this sort of thing in a smartmedia, multimedia, or securedigital form factor, especially if the interfaces of the memoryslot based MP3 players improve. It would be cool to have 6GB of mp3s along and still have $200 in cash more than the ipod freaks...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You can't moderate and post in the same story. (well you can if you moderate first then post but all your mods will be erased.
There have been a few press releases about significant reductions in form factor, but the storage capacity is also much less. Just hang out until they get as fast, as capacious, and as cheap.
Of course, when they do,...
Just to let you know, 30,000 yen is around $278 american. If this pushes down to 10,000 yen that will be around $93 dollars.
...it will be a bit before the price comes down enough to permit it to be used in an MP3 player.
That's not impressive, really. You'd still need a helluva lot of them to get a decent amount of storage space. If they because USB compatible, though, then it might help speed up the development of USB drives.
100 of these crammed together. They could hold about 200G and only be about 5 times the size of a normal drive!
the Japanese Pocket-Size PC Cube
Article stated: The company expects each drive to cost around 30,000 yen ($278.46) initially, but projects that mass production will push down the price to less than 10,000 yen ($92.83) within a few years.
Of course, exchange rates may change significantly before the price drops to 10,000 yen.
That sounds exactly like my ThinkPad, but does yours have gigabit ethernet, integrated bluetooth, integrated 802.11b and 802.11a, a 7200RPM 60GB HDD, a modular bay (normally DVD/CD-RW), trackpoint and touchpad, an integrated encryption/security chip, and a keyboard light, all in a 1"-thick case? My laptop may be ugly, but it's what's inside that counts.
On-topic part: the HDD actually uses a glass-based compound to achieve its small size and speed, rather than the metallic platters in most units.
Inches are totaly inappropriate for small measurements, or for any technical stuff for that matter. Use millimetres or centimetres instead!
No wonder why I see my mods (karma) go up and down sometimes.
When I RTFA, I noted a related story on the new Compact Flash 4GB Microdrive and found a randomly chosen supplier with more specs and claims that these are in stock now. Just think, a DVD worth of data on a single CF card. Now I can start taking all my digital pictures in RAW format.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
/Waiting for AC to get the joke...../
Apple wants to bring $100 iPod to the market. They can't push the price of current models, but they can bring a new, cheaper and smaller (maybe Flash drive) version to go with that Pepsi promotion.
that being said, there are circulating rumors of Smaller/Cheaper iPods.
a REALLY small beowulf cluster of...oh nevermind....
You know, I think it would be kinda nifty to set up five or six of these micro drives in RAID 5 configuration. I mean, talk about a solid mini-application server for household use.
Life is not for the lazy.
It should have quite low power consumption.
All else being equal, the power consumption of similar hard disks should be approximately proportional to the square of their radii.
Of course, friction is a funny thing, and the engineering may need to be different for a small device, so YMMV. In general, smaller disks will use less power.
Damn Sig!
Imagine a handheld GPS locator with every city map!
.
Or that you can set to record a timespace waypoint every five minutes.
You could tie one of these to your outdoor cat and see how many owners he has . .
Stefan
Yeah, or maybe they'll finally realize that everyone wants RAID in their IPods! With smaller drives they can make it happen. How are you supposed to run a serious production IPod w/o some form of disk redundancy! I mean seriously now Apple, let's get w/ the program.
This is BIG news. It looks like cell phones will become the poor man's computer. How many billions of people live in China and India again? Over two billion.
The article says 2-3 GB....With no mention of future increases.....This is more than likely to compete with CF not hard drives in ipods and such.
...is 1.8 inch not 1.5
high density solid state storage devices
Having seen 2 GB USB memory keys starting to become available, I have to wonder what the great advantage is of the microdrive.
I've heard the memory keys are limited by the number of erase/write cycles (to ~10,000) before they wear out, and also limited to data transfer speeds of about 1 MB/s (although I think USB 2.0 is supposed to be better).
Unforunately, I didn't see any specifications about the read/write speed for this drive, but if it's going to plug into a USB port then it has no practical advantage over the solid state memory device.
Is there any other reason you'd want a mechanical device like this over solid state memory?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Now they need to make 'em edible, so that I can easily and REALLY securely get rid of all that kiddy pr0-err, MP3s that I have on my computer...:::looks around hastily, then runs away:::
yes to 802.11b, next model up has gigabit ethernet, same with bt, and it has a 5400rpm harddrive, I havent even seen a 7200rpm harddrive for a laptop that didnt suck power, oh and this machine is WAY less than an inch thick...
keanmarine.com
computers may be small enough to fit in a single room.
did you miss the point where he said it was $1000? we know apple has great shit, not everyone can afford apple.
That's got to be a Troll but I'll bite...
Nobody except maybe no-names make laptops cheaper than Toshiba.. they feel cheap, look cheap, twist and crack, break...crappy stuff.
If the iPod gets an smaller, it ould be too easy to lost, imo. Unless they leave the device the same size and put the extra space to use for the battery. That would be pretty sweet
Why wait for Apple? Creative, Rio, and RCA are already using 1" 1.5GB Cornice drives in some tiny mp3 players that make the iPod seem oversized. Cornice says they will have a 5GB model around the middle of 2004...
Da Blog
Smaller, faster, better! This is cool stuff. Soon they're going to be pushing the physical limits of manufacturing!
Does anyone know if there's a company working on applying MEMS fabrication to similar devices?
=Smidge=
Most of the power used by a hard drive I would presume is used to spin the platters. With a mass and diameter this low, spun at the same rpm as standard drives the power used would be:
a) huge
b) average
c) miniscule
d) I can't think for myself and must be explicitly told.
Come on, at a tiny 0.85" it has to have really really low power consumption.
2 to 3 G is a drop in the bucket.
Already 1 to 2G flash cards/USB keys/etc are available with no moving parts, no shock sensitivity, instant "start up", lower power consumption... that is, all the usual solid state advantages over non-solid state devices.
In the past solid state also meant more expensive. Today, the solid state parts will even be competitve in price.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
OK, so the T-Cube story on Slashdot is from 6 hours ago, so this is _way_ out of date, and the things run TRON rather than Linux, so you'd need to do a bit of work to port Beowulf to them. At least they've got network interfaces...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wowsers, just 0.85"! One-dimensional storage is teh FUTARE!!!1
Sure, on still pictures, this is plenty of space. But a DVD is ~4.7GB - is 2-3GB enough for good video recording, or will you also have to haul around an iPod to upload your pictures to?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No matter how many people say they jog/run with their iPod fine, there's no denying that the sucker locks up for a whole lot of people.
"Mine's smaller than yours!"
"No, mine's smaller"
"No, mine... oh, wait, what am I saying!"
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Here's the picture and report(Japanese).
The small picture posted in the article will be more real-size for most people.
...that we should post so much troll and doubt over so small a thing....
Such a little thing...
Not to mention wireless offsite backup and hourly automated optical backups in case of viruses, user error, or environmental disasters. Apple is really lagging, they're almost dead, flapping around like a salmon that missed the waterfall and ended up on dry land.
If you want something like this then check out the Frontier Labs Nex IA. It's got that iPod white goods plastic look and takes Type I & II Compact Flash memory cards or MicroDrives (I think these go to 4GB now with the latest models). Built-in FM tuner and voice/FM recording. You can swap in and out media cards with music or data on them. All the no-skip benefit of static devices with some expandability. Runs on AA. Nice.
1GB, $250
512MB, $250
256MB, $150
Yes, I know the 1GB/512MB pricing is screwed. Go figure.
Da Blog
Right... because Apple makes ThinkPads.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
michael agrees:
jobs by name, jobs by occupation
I don't care how much power it takes if I get 5-6 hours of use on a charge.
How come no one ever mentions 4GB compact flash cards. It's sad to see so many "Slashdotters" who think it's still 2002.
What is with that font? Tons of Far-East sources use that same strange font in all English-language printing. I first encountered it as a kid, on the back of some Chinese sandpaper. Does anyone else notice these things? Or am I nuts?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
maybe a troll, maybe flamebait. In my opinion, insightful. Offtopic? what are you mods smoking?
Just telling me one dimension, 0.85", is useless. We live in a n-dimensional world. I forget what that n is, but last time I heard a nuclear physicist speak it was over 7. So tell me its the Length, Width, Height, Diameter, Radius or something useful.
/.'er does that make me? having to RTFA uck.
I had to RTFA to find out it was diameter, what kind of
Actually 0.85 inches is 2.16 cm. The extra digit is not meaningful given the precision of the source.
(Sorry, but this sort of thing drives me crazy. If I read one more newspaper article that transforms "100 meters" into "328.08 feet," I think I'll scream.)
from the smaller-is-better dept.
Doing some wishful thinking... eh Timothy? :D
The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you. - Tom Bradley
It's not the size, but how you use it?
I didn't believe it either....
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I'll take solid-state solution, thankyouverymuchsir
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Are there now mexican standoff's with quaters and postage stamps of this drive?
I don't believe it! I didn't know a Toshiba hard drive was in the iPod. I was thinking of buying an iPod but after being suckered into thinking the Toshiba e740 PDA was worth buying I'll have to seriously think about that iPod now. I have never in my life come across such a piece of crap, as the e740, and such poor service from a company!
his machine is WAY less than an inch thick.
.6"-.7" thick. The 359's are over an inch thick. I think you're mixing up your models.
"WAY less"? What is it, a negative dimension?
The Porteges are about
. . . my collection of midget porn.
you don't need a big disk.
Everyone is talking about iPods and other portable media players. How about using one of these hard drives in a handheld PC? I've been waiting for this for years. Forget carying around a stupid mp3 player AND a palm-top. How about XMMS in your pocket? And for that matter, I wonder how long before Apple decides to add a stylus, color display, and a general purpose OS on the iPod? When handheld PCs eventually do have enough memory/disk space to store large amounts of media, what niche will these hard-disk based players fill anyway?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
...a beowulf^H^H^H^H^H^H^H RAID cluster^H^H^H^H^H^H^H array of these in an ipod!
OW! STOP HITTING ME!! THE VOICES MADE ME DO IT!
Why wait?
Because I'm already running into space limitations on my 10GB iPod between the music on it and that data that I carry back and forth for work. Once the whole Christmas fiasco is out of the way, I'll be upgrading to the 40GB. And you think 1.5GB is going to cut it?
As for oversized? The frickin' thing is the same size as a deck of cards. Very easy to slip into a shirt pocket and carry from my desk to my car. That's all the portability I need.
Wouldn't a 1" cube 3 of these drives at right angles (X, Y, Z) to each other appear to be a very heavy little box, because of the gyroscopic "inertia" in each plane?
--
make install -not war
They mention plans on using it in mobile phones... AFAIK, micro-HDD aren't quite shock-resistant, compared to solid storage. I wonder, how long such drive will live in "sporty" phone, like my Nokia 5100?
-- grmbl woz heer
Well, you only have to wait -2 years for a 5 gig iPod, and when you figure out how to wait negative years then you'll make more money than any mp3 player manufacturer.
For quite sometime the HD drive has been the only way of storing large quantity of data, but is it still the only way?
The memory devices presented as small flashram IC's are certainly moving forward as the prices keeps dropping.
My guess is that its only a matter of time before the small hard disk devices will be dropped again - it is still way to fragile to store data on a HD device.
But is it only me?
...just like a frightened turtle!
For the metric among us.
An EMC frame made of these things. It could sit on your desk! Mmmmm, terabytes.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
...you could put a 4x7 array of them on a carrier to fit a normal 3.5" bay. RAID on 28 spindles in one bay, think of it! :-)
Once the whole Christmas fiasco is out of the way, I'll be upgrading to the 40GB
A friend of mine swapped out her Archos 20GB for an 80GB and she still runs out of space. This thread is discussing small-factor drives so I think that in a way you are thread crapping.
But there is a more general issue. The drive to ever larger capacity for a media handheld is a symptom of there not being sufficient broadband wireless. Eventually, when everyone can get decent 100+ Kbps downloads, then all you will need will be a relatively small hard drive such as the Cornice or the Toshiba. Streaming is the way to go!
I have 1TB+ of mp3s and video that I stream over land line internet (I have Cyberonic DSL 786K upload) so for me it's a relief not to have to carry that damn file server everywhere. Future generations will wonder why everyone assumed they had to sneakernet their entire music collections around with them...
Da Blog
I think the point you make is spurious. We are talking about a significantly smaller form factor drive. Remember when Appl brought out the iPod it was a year later than Archos and Creative and offered only 5GB (compared to their 10GB and 15GB models).
Apple traded capacity for size. At the time some people commented that people wanted and were used to more than 5Gb so the iPod was doomed. They were wrong.
Now today you can get 80GB in the 2.5" factor, 40GB in the iPod's 1.5' factor, and some companies are creating a new niche with these sub 1" drives.
And you are putting yourself in the same position as Apple's competitors a couple of years ago. Do you really feel that confident, to say that the current iPod form factor and capacity is the optimal handheld audio size?
If Apple or anyone else bring out a model using these 22mm drives, then they will be limited to around a GB at present. But they will have marvellously small drives with long battery life.
Maybe they will compete well with flash ram players, maybe not. Personally I think they will have to wait for a year or two so their capacity can exceed the 1GB and 4GB CF cards now available at a lower cost.
Da Blog
Clayton Christensen was interested in technology innovation and adoption but was having a hard time figuring out how to study it. Then someone suggested that he study disk drives. He makes the case that disk drives are the fruit flies of technology.
In his book he examines why the drives smaller than 3.5" haven't revolutionized disk storage as 3.5", 5.25", 8", 12" did for previous generations.
HP developed a microdrive but the project/product failed because it was "too good" which meant it was too expensive.
The question for the Toshiba drive is whether it will enable new products which will find a new and exploding market.
Cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players are not likely to be that market.
Maybe 100 drive RAID arrays will be the market. (Think bare drives wave soldered to the board.) Then again, maybe not, because this idea was proposed in the mid-90s and went nowhere.
How about kids toys? A toy bear loaded with 1000 stories and rhymes, with the story selected based on randomness and keying off some crude voice recognition. "Tell me a story" starts it talking.
One advantage of the small drive is that it has far less mass and with less mass, less rigidity is required to shock proof the drive. Why can't ants be scaled up to man size? The greater mass of a man sized ant would require material strength beyond any natural or man made technology.