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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."

27 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. pfft... by focitrixilous+P · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's not how big it is, it's how you use it...

    --
    SAILING MISHAP
    1. Re:pfft... by IthnkImParanoid · · Score: 4, Funny

      An especially ironic statement, considering how much of it we use for porn :)

      --
      It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
  2. Why the iPod? Seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Why the iPod? Seriously by grub · · Score: 5, Insightful


      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.

      --
      Trolling is a art,
  3. A drop on the factual side by NeoThermic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

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    Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
  4. 1 gigabyte flash by morcheeba · · Score: 4, Informative

    I wonder how this will compete with Samsung's new one gigabyte (8 GBit) flash. With a storage capacity of only 2-3 GB, this drive is only 2 or 3 of these flash chips, so competing on size would be hard. Hopefully it's much cheaper.

    --
    HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
    1. Re:1 gigabyte flash by HiThere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    2. Re:1 gigabyte flash by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 4, Informative

      I think concerns about flash memory wearing out are usually overblown. I see flash cards advertised as having a minimum lifetime of 1,000,000 rewrite cycles. Suppose you formatted the card as ext3. Even if you wrote to the card once every minute around the clock, and it wrote to the same sectors each time, it would take more than two years to get up to a million writes. And who writes to their flash card every minute? Maybe you wouldn't want to use it as your permanent home directory for a knoppix install you used every day, but for any other use, I'd say that it's unlikely you'll get up to 1,000,000 writes anytime soon.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    3. 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.

      --
      As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
    4. Re:1 gigabyte flash by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 4, Informative

      Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are several linux filesystems suitable for embedded work, and they are designed for flash-card environments. There's cramfs which is a read-only compressed filesystem so you can cram as much stuff as possible into limited Flash space (to upgrade you just re-flash the entire filesystem with a new cramfs disk image, good for simple devices that can be upgraded with new ROMs). There's ramdisks or RAMFS to complement cramfs and make a usable Linux system where nothing at all is ever written to Flash. There's also JFFS which is a journaled filesystem made explicitly for Flash devices, which does try to adapt to Flash's weaknesses. It is used on iPAQs and other handhelds as the main filesystem.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
  5. So much porn... by scosol · · Score: 5, Funny

    in such a small place...

    God bless technology!

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  6. 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.
  7. 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,
    2. Re:The thing I find interesting about this... by dhovis · · Score: 4, Informative
      Well,

      Remember that area goes as the square of the diamater, so this new hard drive is only 72% of the area of a 1 inch drive. They don't mention the thickness, but if it is thinner than the 1 inch drives, then there is better than 30% savings on volume. That is nothing to sneeze at.

      As long as my phone has a vibrate mode, I don't think I want a hard disk in it...
      One thing to remember is that the smaller the radius of the hard disk platter, the less sensitive it will be to vibrations anyway. That is why iPods are relatively robust (that and good caching, so the hard drive is rarely moving anyway).
      --

      --
      The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.

    3. Re:The thing I find interesting about this... by furiousgeorge · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >>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.

  8. Size Matters? by fmlug.org · · Score: 5, Funny

    Great so I can loose this sucker just like I keep loosing that tiny cell phone I had to buy. Or better yet they will prob combine the two and make the worlds smallest cell with a HD. So then I can loose both at the same time. How small do we need things, really. I thought women always say "size matters!" if so the geeks are going in the wrong direction.

  9. Imagine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    100 of these crammed together. They could hold about 200G and only be about 5 times the size of a normal drive!

  10. 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

  11. Re:Usage by rgmoore · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's already available, at least for more expensive cameras. You can get an IBM microdrive in a Compact Flash Type II form factor, which is a bit thicker but otherwise dimensionally compatible with the regular Compact Flash cards. Less expensive cameras aren't designed to accept both Type I and Type II, but many of the high-end ones- including all of the Digital SLRs, AFAIK- are. The extra capacity is obviously really useful when dealing with a 6+ megapixel camera that may want to save pictures in raw (i.e. not compressed) format. The availablility of hard drive storage is one of the key things that keeps Compact Flash relevant; it's bigger and clunkier than other card types, but at the very high end it can hold way more than any of the others.

    --

    There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  12. Re:0.85 by imsabbel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ????
    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...

    --
    HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
  13. 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.

  14. Amen by 4of12 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    --
    "Provided by the management for your protection."
    1. 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
  15. Re:Usage by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ack! no thanks....

    I'll take my pocket full of 256 meg CF cards.

    If I lose,smash,wash one, I lose 256Meg of storage and not much money or photos lost.

    The last thing I want is to spend my weekend in disneyworld taking photos of my kids pissing on mickey, screaming anti-disney slogans and getting dragged off by the goofy police and lose every one of them due to media failure.

    for holding divx files for me to watch on my Zaurus? yes! important things like digital photos? nope.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  16. some day by khuber · · Score: 5, Funny

    computers may be small enough to fit in a single room.

  17. Is that a toshiba hdd in your pocket..... by reality-bytes · · Score: 4, Funny


    ....or are you cold?

    --
    Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.