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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."

10 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Microdrive by momerath2003 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  2. The thing I find interesting about this... by foxtrot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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...

    1. Re:The thing I find interesting about this... by grub · · Score: 4, Interesting


      which I believe is what they're referring to by "1 inch" hard disk drive is too large for cellphones

      Whenever I read about hard disks in a cell phone I always wonder about the gyroscope effect making the phone hard to manage. Power up a standard hard drive and try turning it perpindicular to the spindle and see what I mean.

      --
      Trolling is a art,
  3. Usage by CrystalChronicles · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  4. 4GB MIcrodrive by G4from128k · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  5. Ooooh . . . GPS application by StefanJ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Imagine a handheld GPS locator with every city map!

    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

  6. Poor man's computer by King+Bo+Bo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Amen by RevAaron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  8. Re:Instead of smaller... by ItMustBeEsoteric · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:1 gigabyte flash by Sloppy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    What occurs to me, when I read stuff like this, is that we still don't have a lot of diversity in filesystems. Ext3, Reiserfs, XFS, JFS.. all written for tradeoffs of reliability vs various different types of performance. But when was the last time you heard of a filesystem that was designed to not write to the same sector over and over?

    Me neither.

    There's still a frontier out there, and room to innovate and make one's mark.

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