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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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