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Toshiba Develops 0.85'' Hard Disk

Posted by timothy on from the smaller-is-better dept.

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."

16 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Why the iPod? Seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It could benefit all hard drive based music players, not just the iPod.

    1. Re:Why the iPod? Seriously by grub · · Score: 5, Insightful


      2-3GB on a 0.85" drive isn't much compared to the 30GB+ on a 1.5" drive. That said I wish they'd put more money into developing high density solid state storage devices. 0.85" is cool but it's still a mechanical device with all the inherent problems.

      --
      Trolling is a art,
    2. Re:Why the iPod? Seriously by Zeinfeld · · Score: 3, Insightful
      2-3GB on a 0.85" drive isn't much compared to the 30GB+ on a 1.5" drive.

      Try building an IPOD into a pair of headphones. The advantage of compact flash is you can now store enough data for almost any conceivable portable use. Like when did you last listen to 30Gb worth of MP3 without recharging your batteries?

      The role of an iPod formfactor device is to provide a portable repository from which to fill up the wearable media. No an ipod is too heavy to count as wearable.

      The big problem with these disk ideas is that they end up costing a lot - $500 to $200, there is no low end version like there is for flash rom. I typically buy whatever memory is $60 at costco these days, but then again for photography that is easily sufficient, I do not fill up 256K chips before I can reach my laptop.

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  2. A drop on the factual side by NeoThermic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

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  3. 0.85 by rkz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:0.85 by imsabbel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ????
      Could you explain wtf this has to do with access time?
      If you can track to a film with audio sync or not is purely dependent on the container and the audio codec. Ogg or avi mit vbr mp3 can create problems, seek times dont (your blockindey is already in hd-cache, and if you dont jump into an i frame, decoding a lot of b/p frames (up to 11 in mpeg2 up to 100s in mpeg4) will take a lot longer than seek time.

      But even if seek time would be important for that stuff: Your 0.85" hd will have a lot worse seek time than any normal 3.5" drive. Because of the simple fact that you cant fit very powerfull magnets / coils in such a small package.
      If your reasoning would be true, we would have servers running of microdrive raids for years...

      --
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  4. Wait, wait, wait... by BAM0027 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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,...

  5. Re:1 gigabyte flash by HiThere · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ability to do rewrites to a sector could be significantly different, however. There are recommendations to not format flash to ext3 because of frequent rewrites to the same sectors, which could cause the flash cells to end-of-life pretty quickly, but hard disks don't generally have that problem. (OTOH, neither do vfat systems...not sure about ext2.)

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  6. Re:1 gigabyte flash by pbox · · Score: 3, Insightful

    300 USD might buy you 3GB flash after some rebate crap. By the time this product comes out in 1-2 years, the final price will likely to be less and just below equivalent flash capacity. See what happened to IBM Microdrives vs. CompactFlash... It is not earth shattering invention, just normal evolution. Now 30 GB in that size, that would be somethin'.

    --
    Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
  7. Amen by 4of12 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."
  8. Re:The thing I find interesting about this... by furiousgeorge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >>Whenever I read about hard disks in a cell
    >>phone I always wonder about the gyroscope
    >>effect making the phone hard to manage.

    What....? Those millions of peoples with iPods seem to be able to power them up and turn them without falling over.

    Current implementations demonstrate the gyroscopic effects aren't a concern (except possible for the engineers designing them). Smaller disks will make it even less so.

  9. I would so lost that by Unregistered · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  10. Power Consumption... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  11. Instead of smaller... by AvantLegion · · Score: 3, Insightful
    ... how about making them shock-proof?

    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.

  12. Re:Poor man's computer by phatsharpie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    China, despite having the world's largest mobile phone market (~250 million users), the growth is now mainly in the lower end of the market, so innovations like these will take a long time to penetrate.

    http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-11/10/c on tent_280187.htm

    However, I remember reading that most people in Japan have already using their mobiles to access the Internet by default. A lot of Japanese don't even have home Internet access, if I recall correctly, because mobile access has been so good.

    -B

  13. Re:pfft... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    i always thought /. needed more small dick jokes.
    hilarious.