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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."
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.
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As the article stated:
Despite the smaller size, Toshiba's HDD has a storage capacity of 2-3GB
that being said, there are circulating rumors of Smaller/Cheaper iPods.
It's already available, at least for more expensive cameras. You can get an IBM microdrive in a Compact Flash Type II form factor, which is a bit thicker but otherwise dimensionally compatible with the regular Compact Flash cards. Less expensive cameras aren't designed to accept both Type I and Type II, but many of the high-end ones- including all of the Digital SLRs, AFAIK- are. The extra capacity is obviously really useful when dealing with a 6+ megapixel camera that may want to save pictures in raw (i.e. not compressed) format. The availablility of hard drive storage is one of the key things that keeps Compact Flash relevant; it's bigger and clunkier than other card types, but at the very high end it can hold way more than any of the others.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
The angular momentum is (for a point)
L = M x R^2 x omega
So scales as the square of the disk radius. The radius of a standard 3.5" disk is probably about 1.7", the radius of this new disk is 0.425". The small disk will therefore have about 5% of the momentum of the larger disk (assuming all else is equal).
Also, all else is not equal: the minature disk will spin slower for sure. 5400RPM or less.
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Whenever I read about hard disks in a cell phone I always wonder about the gyroscope effect making the phone hard to manage.
I imagine that, for power saving purposes, the hard drive would spin slowly, and be spun down most of the time anyway.
This raises another question, however: When the mobile phone starts its hard drive, would the phone start to spin?
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The Rio Karma plays MP3, WMA, Ogg and FLAC, but it includes a 20GB hard drive. It also has an ethernet port in its docking station.
Remember that area goes as the square of the diamater, so this new hard drive is only 72% of the area of a 1 inch drive. They don't mention the thickness, but if it is thinner than the 1 inch drives, then there is better than 30% savings on volume. That is nothing to sneeze at.
One thing to remember is that the smaller the radius of the hard disk platter, the less sensitive it will be to vibrations anyway. That is why iPods are relatively robust (that and good caching, so the hard drive is rarely moving anyway).--
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Most movies take up that much space only when you add in all the alternate language tracks & video extras that are on the disc. You'd be suprised how small some of those movies can get when you just want one language track, and no extras. And then if you encode it in something like DivX or xvid, you can get them _really_ small.
In case you ever leave America one day, you'll notice that almost all countries in the world except USA use the metric system
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...
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Here's the picture and report(Japanese).
The small picture posted in the article will be more real-size for most people.
Price. Pricewatch lists the cheapest 2GB USB memory key as going for $514 and the cheapest 2GB microdrive as going for $195. In 4 GB sizes I'd expect the microdrive to have an even bigger advantage, but there's no listing for 4 GB USB memory keys, probably because they're too expensive for anyone to think about them.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Heh. haha. and heh again!
I think you're confusing China and India with more affluent Asian nations. Yes, darn near everyone in Japan has a cell phone. But in China or India? What the hell are you thinking, man! Plenty of those people don't have electricity at all, let alone a really expensive cell-phone with a really expensive tiny hard drive.
How cheap do you think these tiny drives will be? The same HD space in a bigger drive (esp if second hand) is a fraction of the cost. Seems to me that older technology would be for the "poor man's computer," rather than the newest and most expensive stuff.
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250 million chinese have mobiles phones at present and this is expected to grow to 500M by 2007.
Mobile phone penetration is much higher in the US. at 50% but whats 50% of 300M?
hi-tech phones the chinese may not have but they do have mobiles.