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4GB HD in Under an Inch
werwerf writes "In need of hard disk space but not much physical space? Toshiba is developing a sub inch HD capable of holding from 2 to 4Gb.
Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!" They expect to be in mass production by the fall. Also, News.com is reporting that Hitachi's 1-inch 4GB drive is in Apple's new iPod mini.
Can someone who has owned an IBM Microdrive comment on the reliability of ultra-small hard drives such as these?
... but, if these micro drives are reliable enough, then the storage capacity they offer would be mighty attractive.
I've had too many hard drives (of the desktop or notebook size) fail in my day to feel very comfortable about having one in a device as likely to be subject to stress and shock as a digital camera.
Solid state memory like compactflash just seems so much more elegant than a tiny spinning metal disc with teeny little motors and gears
That's good...for me personally (about average), that works out to about 26GB.
...Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!
Bye bye battery life...
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
They already make microdrive CF cards in 1-2GB capacities.
Why do I still use CF cards? Because solid state devices are far more reliable than a HD. I know it won't freeze at low temperatures, seize at high altitudes, or die if I drop it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not how big your hard drive is, it's how much RAM you have. ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I think we should be focusing our efforts on advancements in solid-state storage devices.
The basic technology for HDDs is very old, they're very fragile, they eat a lot (relatively) of power.
Its what you do with it that counts.
Mind you, I bet you wont be hearing "When im ready for porn, I unveil my 1 incher."
Under an inch? Why smaller? I keep getting told, after the laughing, that bigger is better. /confused
Don't forget the drive anywhere! Do you want someone getting 4gigs of your documents?
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Just thinking... Thumb drives will be come almost obselete.. Why tranfer data on to slow as hell flash chips. Thumb Hard Drives here we come. Just imagine 2gb storage, USB2 and I imagine cheaper than flash cards.
Toshiba is developing a sub inch HD capable of holding from 2 to 4Gb....Also, News.com is reporting that Hitachi's 1-inch 4GB drive is in Apple's new iPod mini.
/., no matter how unrelated.
It's nice to see comments about iPods sneak into damned near every story on
"SCO may not have bought all the IP to Unix, and this has nothing to do with the OS used on the iPod."
"Verisign Certificate Expiration Causes Multiple Problems, unrelated to the battery problems in iPod."
"Linksys DVD player w/ WiFi and ethernet, an iPod for video."
"Ask Slashdot: How Much Broadband Usage is Too Much? Sounds like a song I'd like to download to my iPod!!"
While these swimming trunks might look very tight and small and unimpressive, I can gaurentee you there are 4 gigs hidden down there.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
A DVD holds ~4.7gb. This sounds almost the perfect size to me for a camcorder. You could record straight to the hard drive, and then transfer the video straight to either a standalone dvd burner, or to your desktop machine and edit/burn from there.
no comment
As in Toshiba, Japan? Does that mean i can't buy it?..Aren't slashdotters boycotting imported products to protest the loss of American hard drive making jobs. Or does all that BS about the future of America only apply to IT jobs...
I hid that uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for five years...
I've been using a Microdrive in my digital cameras for the past 3 years now. Someone asked about reliability, hasn't given me any problems, but it is of course slow compared to regular CF RAM. Now that CF RAM is so cheap, I've switched to a Lexar 40x 1GB flash card, and keep the microdrive as a backup. The Microdrives were a great compromise at a time when CF RAM was really expensive.
--Mike
How old the quarter is has nothing to do with how old the picture is. It only tells you the MAX age not the min age of the picture. You are probably trolling though and caught a stupid moderator.
But its obvious, from the make of the quarter, that this thing has been out since AT LEAST 1999, because they're using an ancient quarter with an eagle tails side. They should at least use a quarter that's in circulation
Yeah, all quarters from 1999 or earlier have been removed from circulation. Good luck finding one.
Eh? [looks over at his digicam with 330MB IBM compactflash microdrive]
Digicams and PDAs have been using microdrives for years. They're up to 4GB these days I think; 1GB is more common, the older 180 is pretty much NLA and the 330 is almost too.
Furthermore- you've obviously not understood the point of removable media. Most digicams, even if they support USB 2.0 or Firewire, can't move data very fast; one camera(the Kodak 14n) barely manages 1.5MB/sec despite costing five thousand dollars and generating 14 megapixel files(yes, 14). I can nearly max out my CF card using either a PCMCIA, USB2, or Firewire CF reader, but on-camera transfer usually blows, because the processors are very slow, using embedded solutions for JPEG/RAW image compression; the CPU is more and more just a 'supervisor'. Slow clock speeds = slow transfer speeds. More importantly, i can pop out the CF card, and pop in a new one when I fill it up. If I'm a sports or event photographer, I hand that card to a guy who sprints over to the truck and editors start downloading the images while I shoot onto another card.
And yes, the kinds of people who would need 4GB in a digicam are precisely the kind of people who need to be able to pop ANOTHER 4gb in. Top of the line Canon EOS 1Ds will generate 11+ megapixel files. They get big, fast. Leaf and Phase One now make 11-20MP digital backs for medium format, as does Kodak and now Fuji. The digital backs generate enormous files, to the point that some are tethered-operation only, or come with a unit that attaches to the bottom of the camera and houses a laptop hard drive.
Your average consumer, and even many prosumers, have absolutely no use for a 4GB hard drive in their camera, and the power requirements mean camera makers would never go for it. A solid-state card is so much more power efficient than any hard drive, it's not funny.
Please help metamoderate.
Why bother with this "under an inch" stuff??
I got an email this afternoon promising to add "3+ inches" or my money back!!
What? Does Toshiba think I'm a total tard or something???
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
How the hell am I supposed to plug an IDE cable into that thing?!
::looks down::
... Hey, 640k is more than I'll ever need, right?
.. Right?
I got a +5, Troll
more pr0n per bite :-)
I wonder if I'll be able to move the full length paris hilton video around with me soon ?
Later on I found out I shouldn't have even been using the camera at sub-freezing, but I got away with it that time. (Canon D30)
Fortunately the Microdrive heats up a lot when in use.
Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!
Get your hard drives out of my portable devices. Devices with no moving parts are infinitely better than any that have them. Drives have the following disadvantages:
(1) Poor battery life
(2) Disk spin up time
(3) Shock / impact problems and drive crashes
You can get 4GB solid state compactflash cards right now (as recently announced by Lexar). They're merely expensive. Expend effort bringing the cost of those down and the market for 4GB mini hard drives will evaporate.
Of course, the nice thing about this is the hope that eventually we'll get that "$150 iPod mini" or some other small form factor device (like a Palm Pilot with a HDD - perfect for my NES emulator....)
;).
But what I keep seeing is that while the physical size shrinks - 1", 0.85", etc, the space it holds remains fairly constant - 1GB, 4GB, so on.
Part of the problem I see is that nobody wants to make a really cheap 2GB solution, since "nobody wants 2GB for anything by then". I believe it's why Apple has their iPod Mini at 4GB and won't go cheaper - it's hard to simply find something that small with less capacity.
Kind of like ordering hard drives these days. I checked the prices on my old Proliant box. It's more expensive to order a 9 GB SCSI drive than to buy an 18 GB. Why? Who the hell wants to make a 9 GB when "everybody" wants to by an 18?
In the end, perhaps solid state will be the answer - probably in "another year or two". No big hurry, since I already have a 30 GB iPod - but it means my wife will have to wait longer
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I have four Hitachi/IBM microdrives (the oldest is 2 and half years old) and have never had any problems at all. I've even had my camera crash (dead batteries) during writes without trashing the disk. Although I'm not too hard on my stuff, they have been dropped occassionally and x-rayed innumerable times without ill effect.
Others have found them reliable too. They even been used by NASA on at least two shuttle missions according to this review
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Surely it would be better to go with non-moving parts. When you get into that size range, extreme portability is obviously the goal. But hard drives don't do well with constant motion. Just look at all the complaints from joggers/runners trying to use ipods.
We've already got 1 and 2 gig CF cards that can take all kinds of abuse without skipping a beat. What's gained by using a hard drive with all those tiny, delicate moving parts?
i want a MACROdrive :P
Wouldnt you like to be a pepper too?
"Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!"
Considering that I get over 350 high quality, FIVE megapixel photos onto my 512 MB CF card, how many people really need to store thousands of photos before uploading them to a PC???
Photo-journalists and "embeded" reporters sure, but why does joe hobbist or grandma need such capacity in a digicam??
My guess is that until price becomes dirt cheap, the power consumption is proven to be acceptable, and the reliability equals that of CF, that no average person is going to buy these.
Just my 2 cents.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
PhysicsExpert isn't even as funny as PhysicsGenius.
Do you think that because NASA uses them that is going to add to credibility concerning reliability of the devices?
Toshiba is developing a sub inch HD
Hard Drive: "I was in the pool! I was in the pool!"
As I predicted in a past comment, Apple is indeed using the Hitachi 4gb microdrive. The drive should be hitting shelves sometime next week - there are one or two online retailers who claim to have it now.
What's more interesting, though, is its price. The lowest price I could find for a 4gb microdrive was well over $500 - TWICE that of the iPod mini.
If the drive in the iPod is the same thing being sold by Hitachi (ie. it still has a CF connector), you could get this for half-price. Digital camera users would love this...
This seems to disqualify the notion that the mini is too expensive. I'd say that it's too cheap for Apple to be making any money on it at all. Even IF apple could get the drives for around $200 each, which is the lowest realistic price possible, you've got to remember that there's a lot more stuff in an iPod than the hard drive and Apple still needs to make a profit.
Could the mini just be a loss-leader to promite the iTMS
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
What's the use of a sub-inch HD if it's 6 inch tall and 4 inch wide anyway?
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
I think the weight of these devices should be a listed spec, small size is nice but if its 10X as heavy as a memory stick, well it's still not that usefull.
R r
most (paranoid) pjs use multiple smallish cards (256-512) and switch them frequently b/c if you have a 4 gig card which fails and blows a complete day of shooting you're very much SOL in terms of landing a new assignment...
Actually nowadays the latest is to slap on a wifi-enabled 'bottom' (it attaches to the bottom of the camera) on your Nikon D2H and remote-upload to your ftp server from the field.
-- the cake is a lie
E e
I have four eagle tail quarters just chillin' on my desk, change from the local coffee shop. I'd hardly call them antique collector's items.
Hard drive. What is that all about? Is it good or is it whack?
P p
Fortunately the Microdrive heats up a lot when in use.
And that kick when it spins up is the cutest thing ever.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
So...who's the first to make a joke about "I've got 8Gigs in my wang baby..."?
Still last post. hahahahahahah.
I've been looking at the Fuji 602 for a while now... it is one of very few digicams that has all the features I am looking for: CFII support, AA batteries (I have batallions of NiMH AAs), and an excellent hi-res 30fps movie mode with sound.
How good is the movie mode? Is it MPEG2? Can you zoom while shooting a movie?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Don't forget that you can use the HD's heat to spin the platter in the first place. You start the whole thing up by shaking the iPod or PDA a couple of times. The only known disadvantage to this technology is that it causes your body's entropy to increase, thus making you age faster--and decreasing your IQ.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
L l
HEY THAR COWBOY
"They already make microdrive CF cards in 1-2GB capacities.
Why do I still use CF cards? Because solid state devices are far more reliable than a HD"
Apparently moderators don't know that microdrive CF cards _are_ hard drives, not solid state. So this post makes no sense.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Read up on the difference between:
terminus ante quem, and
terminus post quem.
This site even uses coins as an example.
"...over 350 high quality, FIVE megapixel photos onto my 512 MB CF card..."
You're right that Joe Hobbiest might not need the amazing capacity this offers, but even relatively proficient digital photographers would benefit greatly from extra capacity at lower prices. The fact that you're putting 5MP (usually 2560x1920) in excess of 350 on a 512MB card indicates you're using extensive JPG compression which is unacceptable for a lot of print reproduction once the noise becomes visible, especially in situations where large color blocks cease to gradiate smoothly because of the lossy compression.
When using the same resolution in an Olympus E-20n on a 1GB microdrive I can get 110 pictures using the camera's built-in RAW format or 70 TIFF; this absolutely faithful reproduction is quite desirable when you know you'd like to blow up a print after the fact.
Any spoon would be too big.
But it's those times it doesn't that worries me! At least with a CF card I don't have to hope I'll get lucky under more extreme conditions.
I think altitude might be more worrysome than cold though, I think I read that 10,000 feet was the reccomended ceiling. In Colorado plenty of hikes go way beyond that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
These would be at place in a digital video camera even better. JVC (and probably others) has a few of these very small babies already. And speed and storage space are very important for these kind of camera's.
With 4 GB you can easily store hours of high quality video. One of the last places where tape is still common is going to bite the dust.
Just backup media to go. That might be a tough one to crack. For low speed storage it is very economical.
Meant to say - "Why do I still use solid state CF cards". I think the moderators and another poster understood just fine... It's kind of like that trick where you can leave out letters of words in a sentance but still have the meaning come through, only on a higher level.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're right that Joe Hobbiest might not...
Yes, many men are hobby, but Joe is certainly the hobbiest.
BTW, correct spelling is hobbyist
If it were any small and it would be an example of nano-technology?
Something tells me a 40 pin SATA isn't going to cut it.
I disagree. I have been taking digital photographs for several years. In that time, I have had three smartmedia and two compactflash cards die on me. In the same time, I haven't lost a single hard drive. Furthermore, I've had a number of GOOD flash cards go nuts on me if I didn't treat them with TLC...some would lose their filesystem, and thus all my photos, if I didn't wait an extra second before ejecting them after my camera said it was okay.
I have never had a hard drive do this.
At the end of the day, all the claims of the reliability of solid state run contrary to my experience. And that kind of makes sense to me. I'd rather rely on a magnetic signal than an electrical one any day of the week...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It depends on many things. I get far greater battery life out of my D100 with flash than with microdrive.
I find a 4GB hard drive very uninteresting. Make it 10GB or more and that's different.
I can give you 4 inches in less than a minute!
Many things can fail in a hard drive. Flash is far, far more reliable. Sorry to hear of your failures but they are not indicative of flash in general.
I've had two microdrive failures and zero flash failures. Hard drive failures are a fact of life.
Capacity [KB] * Erase Cycles / Total Data Update Rate [KB/Day] = Lifespan (days) Using TFFS, not FAT Lifespan Calc Here Here
Because the form-factor for the microdrive is 1". This one is smaller. The platter inside a microdrive is larger than 1/2".
There are almost 100 comments, and no one noticed the dupe yet? I guess it's been a few weeks since the original story, but there's nothing new here, folks.
I'm from the DoRD*, here to arrest a Mr A Coward for redundantly supposing to be... Ah- me!
*- Department of Redundancy Dept
I agree with you on the CDs comment. They're crap. The same with DVDs. I actually held out for a number of years on buying a DVD player and starting a DVD collection in the hopes that some new technology would come out and trump it.
I'm not even talking about some crazy new kind of storage. All I want is a nice, very thin, plastic jacket that goes around the DVD to protect it. Does anyone remember floppy disks? That's what I'm thinking about, except not floppy. It wouldn't considerably add to the size of the DVD; and it would enable you to toss them around as you see fit, instead of treating them like faberge eggs.
Why will it never happen? Because it's not cost effective.
More info and a couple pictures at imaging-resource
That's extremely atypical. What brand/model flash cards were you using? Also, CF is much, much faster than a microdrive, so when using it with something like a 1D or a D2H that shoots at 8fps, having CF, which is more expensive than a microdrive, empties your buffer that much faster so you can keep shooting.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Mods... I do believe this guy was trying for a +1 funny....
But of course, everyone is SO FUCKING LITERAL....
Must have a micro-humor drive
NO I'm not signing this!
http://www.skfriends.com/wtc-biggart-album.htm
Follow the link. It was a compact flash card. Not a microdrive.
I take photos fior a living, and have done tests comparing JPEGs with TIFFs from my two cameras (Nikon D1X and D100). There is really only an incredibly small difference between the two types, when the JPEG is at it's highest setting, and consequently I never, ever, use the TIFF format. RAW is a different thing altogether since it gives you added exposure latitude to play with after you take the photo, amongst other things. But TIFF is not worth the extra storage space, EVER.
They used to have that option, but they killed it.
(Sorry, it had to be done)
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Strange huh?
Small is nice. I want to have a 30 gig in my palm someday
Or GIF! Duh.
Gotta love those iPods! I have a new 20GB version, but I think I would have bought a 4GB version if it was out at the time - so small and so cool :)
;) Just think of your computer with a couple of terabytes of RAM - gotta make some of that solid state though ;)
Anyway the 1.8" versions of 40GB sounds cooler! 8mm high - or the 20GB 5mm!
Anyway the harddisks will be unnecessary soon it seems
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Reply? WTF is with this? :)
The slashdot post says 2-4Gb, however, it should read 2-4GB (as stated in the article)
They make 4 and 8GB solid-state CF cards, but they're incredibly expensive. (and devices that only use FAT16 don't work well...)
And another benefit is that they consume far less power. If it gets 4 times longer use between charges, it can't be bad.
It's a 256 color format. Useless for true-color photos.
Oh and it's patented.
Sheeesh. Does anyone actually check sources?
a rt _intro.htm
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0111/bigg
(sorry, but take the space out after 'biggart' and the link will work)
He used a compact flash card, which are known to be MUCH tougher than microdrives; flash cards are known to regularly survive drops and washing/dry cycles.
Don't we already have 1gb smartmedia/compactflash ? Why not just cluster them together a-la RAID and build a decently-sized amazingly-fast solid-state storage device ?
I hate the 40gb drive in my notebook, it's the slowest part of the equation despite being a higher-end 5400rpm model. If I could slap together 32 x 1gb flash drives in a small-enough space, I'd most likely soil my pants over the blissful transfer speeds.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I used the heck out of my 1GB microdrive in my Nikon D1. It always worked fine dispite a coworker thinking that it was solid state and tossing it around.
Then I stopped using the drive (although it was still in the camera) I continued to use the camera on a tripod for several months in the basement studio via firewire (no uD use)
Then when I went to go mobile again the drive had the click of death (like my Iomegas).
I listened and did not hear the disk spinning so I powered it up in a portabel adapter and thumped it (figuring the the head was stuck on the surface of the disk)
It's worked fine in moderate use for 2 years since. I'd buy another in a uS if I needed it.
"You can learn 10 things by learning one"
Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!"
Eh? It's the other way round. With 4 and 6GB Compact Flash cards (solid state) becoming available from people like Pretec and Lexar, why would you want a microdrive type device which is slower, has moving parts, is more prone to failure, is more expensive and uses way more battery power (especially when idle)?
I predict the demise of the microdrive (and related) when people realise they have no advantages over a normal compact flash card - which will be very soon.
Pretec
Only on Slashdot!
It would seem to me that four 1G (1X512M) sets and a battery would accomplish the same type thing. I thought the only reason for a hard drive was because you couldn't match the same capacity with RAM. Well, 4 gig just ain't that much.
Now 40G will get my attention.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I am sure that once, in about 3-5 years, when the dim witted music industry realizes that these drives exist, they will demand a tax pr. megabyte on them like memory cards for cameras, and so they will be extremely expensive.
My fuji can shoot at 6fps, works just fine with the microdrive. I rarely do so -- there's really only a few instances where I'm taking motion shots and need this feature. When I have to, though, I generally switch over to the SmartMedia card slot, anyway...smartmedia being even more delicate, and faster, than CF in many instances.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I typically use JPEG on the lowest compression settings to allow for greater space, but have noticed that if my plans are to enhance a photo taken in low-light conditions there will be noticeably blocky regions after the fact. This can not always be compensated for by boosting the perceived ambient lighting with greater exposure time up front.
Also, chromatic aberation can be a real bugger in high contrast environments (unless you're lucky enough to have an X3 sensor) minorly enhanced (as in made more prominent) by the compression. 95% of my shooting is great in JPEG; the others do (or would if I remembered always to switch) benefit greatly from the extra space - though if I'm going to do that I'll just use RAW since it's all the same in the end.
Any spoon would be too big.
I've also been taking digital pictures for several years, and still have yet to have a CF problem. Did you have troubles aftr mounting them? I think sometimes early versions of Windows would corrupt them with some readers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The verbage precision might not be high, but, oh, the verbiage!