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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...
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.
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
Me neither.
There's still a frontier out there, and room to innovate and make one's mark.
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