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."

Comments

1 gigabyte flash

[morcheeba]

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.

Re:1 gigabyte flash

[Spy Hunter]

I think concerns about flash memory wearing out are usually overblown. I see flash cards advertised as having a minimum lifetime of 1,000,000 rewrite cycles. Suppose you formatted the card as ext3. Even if you wrote to the card once every minute around the clock, and it wrote to the same sectors each time, it would take more than two years to get up to a million writes. And who writes to their flash card every minute? Maybe you wouldn't want to use it as your permanent home directory for a knoppix install you used every day, but for any other use, I'd say that it's unlikely you'll get up to 1,000,000 writes anytime soon.

Re:1 gigabyte flash

[Spy Hunter]

Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are several linux filesystems suitable for embedded work, and they are designed for flash-card environments. There's cramfs which is a read-only compressed filesystem so you can cram as much stuff as possible into limited Flash space (to upgrade you just re-flash the entire filesystem with a new cramfs disk image, good for simple devices that can be upgraded with new ROMs). There's ramdisks or RAMFS to complement cramfs and make a usable Linux system where nothing at all is ever written to Flash. There's also JFFS which is a journaled filesystem made explicitly for Flash devices, which does try to adapt to Flash's weaknesses. It is used on iPAQs and other handhelds as the main filesystem.

Re:Usage

[rgmoore]

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.

Re:The thing I find interesting about this...

[dhovis]

Well,

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.

As long as my phone has a vibrate mode, I don't think I want a hard disk in it...

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).