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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."
If any of you were wondering about "The 1-inch HDD developed by the US affiliate of Hitachi Ltd," that is the same as (what was) the IBM MicroDrive. IBM's hard drive section was purchased by Hitachi.
Also, it says that the Hitachi 1" hard drive was "released in November," but I know that the IBM MicroDrives have been around a lot longer than that. Maybe it's just that they shrunk a little and grew in capacity.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
...is that a Microdrive, which I believe is what they're referring to by "1 inch" hard disk drive is too large for cellphones, according to the article, but somehow, this .85 inch one isn't. That's not a huge difference in platter size. Is the associated electronic equipment in this one notably smaller? The article doesn't say, but that's the only thing I can think of-- .15 of an inch (that's shy of four millimeters for y'all metric folks) doesn't seem like it would be a deal-breaker.
Not that it really matters to me. As long as my phone has a vibrate mode, I don't think I want a hard disk in it...
I'd love to see this used on a digital camera. Imagine 2 gig of sapce to space your 5 megapixel shots. mmmm Price might be prohibitive at first but what new technology isnt?
When I RTFA, I noted a related story on the new Compact Flash 4GB Microdrive and found a randomly chosen supplier with more specs and claims that these are in stock now. Just think, a DVD worth of data on a single CF card. Now I can start taking all my digital pictures in RAW format.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It should have quite low power consumption.
All else being equal, the power consumption of similar hard disks should be approximately proportional to the square of their radii.
Of course, friction is a funny thing, and the engineering may need to be different for a small device, so YMMV. In general, smaller disks will use less power.
Imagine a handheld GPS locator with every city map!
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Or that you can set to record a timespace waypoint every five minutes.
You could tie one of these to your outdoor cat and see how many owners he has . .
Stefan
This is BIG news. It looks like cell phones will become the poor man's computer. How many billions of people live in China and India again? Over two billion.
why not use magnetic memory? thy have prototypes for magnetic storage in memory modules for computers, why not use MDRAM for memory sticks? it is not limited by read/writes, and it has no moving parts.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Most CompactFlash cards have built-in write conditioning in their controls, which is why it's not much of a problem to write whatever filesystem, including FAT, to them. SmartMedia (really StupidMedia), on the other hand, requires the host to do it.
The IBM Microdrive hasn't had any advantages for a while. That is, as long as that's what you are talking about, rather than meaning the 1.5" PCMCIA drives, as found in the iPod. The PCMCIA drives still have plenty of advantages, price and size being among them- I bought a 2 GB PCMCIA Toshiba HD for $70 over a year ago; how much is that 2 GB key drive? That said, that is $35 per GB, whereas with the Microdrive it's hundreds. And you'd need two of them, which is about the size of the single PCMCIA card. :P
Yes, there's a reason you'd want a mechanical device like this over solid state. Price. That's about it. Depending on the application there may be other factors- if you're doing *tons* of writes then a flash-based solution will pitter out after some time. Any flash will, but usually it's not a big deal, consider how most people use it. But if you were using the flash as swap (as some folks do with their Zauruses), or certain embedded applications, your flash chips could die right quick.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
It is a concern. NAND flash which is generally the technology that leads the density curve needs special algorithms called 'wear leveling' in the device driver/file system to try to prevent 'hot spots' that cause bits to fail prematurely. the lower density NOR flash devices don't have the problem and tend to be used in application where this is expected to be a problem. That being said NAND flash has been used for many years in this type of application so I would describe it as an already solved problem. Given that there is no order of magnitude storage advantage for these miniturized HDD's over flash I can't imagine that flash would not still dominate in both the existing and new applciations it is touted for.
I know I would think twice about have an HDD in a camera etc, I always treat my IPOD with extra care knowing what mechanical magic lurks within....
Your comment about ext3 (and ext2) is correct but VFAT is not immune to the frequent-rewrites problem. The FAT itself (basically a linked list stored as an array) will have frequent rewrites and there is no feature in VFAT to use alternate locations for the FAT. Also directory entries in VFAT will get frequent rewrites (especially the date fields). A flash-friendly filesystem needs to write to all "sectors" with equal frequency. VFAT does not do this.
Not that I think any of this matters. USB keys become obsolete faster than you can wear them out. 16MB keys are already useless and 32MB ones are quickly going that way. I've never seen either size (16MB or 32MB) wear out before being junked. People are buying 512MB keys now for only a few $100. By the time the 512MB keys wear out I fully expect to be buying 10GB keys. I think the "only 10,000 writes" problem is theoretical; it's not a problem in practise.
Though I suspect many USB keys rearrange their writes internally to prevent premature death. This probably means it doesn't matter what filesystem you use.
If you want something like this then check out the Frontier Labs Nex IA. It's got that iPod white goods plastic look and takes Type I & II Compact Flash memory cards or MicroDrives (I think these go to 4GB now with the latest models). Built-in FM tuner and voice/FM recording. You can swap in and out media cards with music or data on them. All the no-skip benefit of static devices with some expandability. Runs on AA. Nice.
1GB, $250
512MB, $250
256MB, $150
Yes, I know the 1GB/512MB pricing is screwed. Go figure.
Da Blog
The iPod only locks up on you if you jog for more than, say, 20 minutes. That is how long the buffer on it lasts. If you happen to be unlucky enough to be running while it starts to spin up, there's a good chance it's going to lock on you. I used to run long distance (just don't have the time anymore), and I've had an iPod lock. Now, my Archos AV120 has never locked on me. Sure, it's been moved while spinning, has actually skipped once. But not locked. I don't mind as skip once every 20 minutes so much as I mind a no-music-until-I-reset-the-iPod-at-home every 20 minutes.
Me neither.
There's still a frontier out there, and room to innovate and make one's mark.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Because Apple are the only ones with half a clue on how to make a good MP3 player.