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

Why the iPod? Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Why the iPod? Seriously

[grub]

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.

A drop on the factual side

[NeoThermic]

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

Re:1 gigabyte flash

[HiThere]

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.)

Re:0.85

[imsabbel]

????
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...

Amen

[4of12]

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?

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

[furiousgeorge]

>>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.