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

Yen?

[ascalon]

Just to let you know, 30,000 yen is around $278 american. If this pushes down to 10,000 yen that will be around $93 dollars.

Limited utility

[marcus]

2 to 3 G is a drop in the bucket.

Already 1 to 2G flash cards/USB keys/etc are available with no moving parts, no shock sensitivity, instant "start up", lower power consumption... that is, all the usual solid state advantages over non-solid state devices.

In the past solid state also meant more expensive. Today, the solid state parts will even be competitve in price.

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

[loose electron]

Sorry - disk drives don't work in a vacuum, the heads require air to lift them off the platter.

BTW - IBM developed a few years back (1994-96)a disk drive with platters the size of a quarter. (about the same size as a 1 Euro coin for you on the other side of the pond.) Consequently this is very old news.

Re:0.85

[loose electron]

Sorry - Rotational latency dominates the access time for a disk drive. If a disk has been defragmented, everything is in a neat order, so the seek time doesn't matter. Just reading the FAT then getting to the first data cluster in the chain matters. Developed the silly things for 15 year, so been there done that... Berkley..... Oh well..