Mini-iPod Mystery Drive Unveiled?

squiggleslash writes "One of the aspects of the '2G mini-iPod' rumour that's so far made it unlikely is the lack of a tiny, cheap, 2G, drive. Well, today Cornice has announced a 2G hard drive (PDF, 100k) that fits the bill. It's available for about $70 in lots of 100,000. The Mac Rumour sites are going faily nuts over this for obvious reasons. The reason the drive is so cheap is that it contains virtually no driver electronics, there's not even a memory buffer - this is the equivalent of a 1980's RLL or MFM drive. At $70 it seems unlikely that the mini-iPod, assuming it's announced tomorrow, will be under $100, but on the other hand the original iPod sold for the same price as the harddrive inside it. Here's hoping..."

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Wikipedia has the answer

[Texas Rose on Lava L]

Although Moore's law has since the 1970s been defined in terms of the number of transistors on a chip, it is common to refer to Moore's law in reference to the rapid continuing advance in computing power per dollar cost.

A similar progression has held for hard disk storage available per dollar cost - in fact, the rate of progression in disk storage over the past 10 years or so has actually been faster than for semiconductors--although, largely because of production cost issues, hard drive performance increases have lagged significantly.

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Re:I wonder....

[laird]

"how the hard drive data density trend compares with Moore's Law"

I remember working this out a few years back -- the hard drive industry was cranking along at about Moore's Law, then IBM started really pushing, and blew past the competition, averaging 75% improvement annually. And for the last few years, the standard hard drive size in PC's has doubled annually. A few data points from digging on the web:

Summer 1999: IBM 340 MB Microdrive, 5 billion bits per square inch.
Summer 2000: IBM 1 GB Microdrive, 15.2 billion bits per square inch.
Summer 2002: IBM demonstrates 1 trillion bits per square inch. This is an 'in the lab' technology, so it'll be a few years until it's a product, but it makes pretty clear that there's some room to grow.

Years ago I made a graph of all of the computer's I'd owned, with CPU speed, display resolution, modem bandwidth, primary storage, and removable storage. It was amazing how they all improved dramatically, though in relative terms displays have improved slowly -- in the same time that a 1.77 MHz 8-bit TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K RAM and a cassette tape drive turned into a 733 MHz 32-bit PowerMac G4 with 1.5 GB or RAM, a DVD-R drive (i.e. improvements on the order of a factor of 1 million) the display went from 64x16 character text display (or 128x48 b/w pixels) to a 1600x1024 pixel, 24 bit deep color display, which is only 6,400x as much data on the screen, and the 300 bps modem became a 1 mbps cable modem, which is only 3,333x as fast. Pathetic compared to improvements in storage, RAM and CPU. :-)

Man, I have to buy a new computer. Same display and cable modem, but a 2 CPU 2 GHz G5 would make those curves so much prettier. :-)