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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.
...Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!
Bye bye battery life...
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
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.
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.
This would be a boon for notebooks though. Even if the MTBF is rather poor compared to the larger drives, the size would make it possible to stick perhaps 6 of these into a notebook in a RAID5 configuration. You wouldn't really need hot-swappable, but if a drive did fail you'd have the others picking up the slack. A big red LED could flash on the notebook telling you to pick up a new drive, and the information for the new drive is rebuilt on the fly.
It might be a bit expensive, but for those looking for a rugged notebook (a la Panasonic Toughbook series) this would be great!
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I have to second this opinion. Solid state just seems the intelligent choice to go with in devices subject to any kind of rapid motion (or sudden stops!). The word "elegant" is a good one.
And as well, I am looking forward to the day a solid-state device replaces hard drive technology for secondary storage.
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
Smaller is better I would expect. Smaller arms traveling a shorter distance have less inertia when they impact, so I would expect these will handle shock pretty well. Discounting that, and just examining the general "resistance to impact" of drives over the last twenty years and you'll see a pretty impressive curve.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
"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.
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.
I'm sure that someone, somewhere, is going to do this. After all, someone went to the effort to make a RAID 0 array using floppy disks!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
"...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.
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.
RAID 5 isn't designed for speed as much as redundancy. The parity check add significant overhead to the whole process.
Form my research RAID 5 has slower Write performance than a single drive do the the parity calculation, BUT it has faster read performance as long as all of the drives are functioning.
Raid 0 or 0 + 1 are both faster than Raid 5 any day but 0 has not redundancy and 0 + 1 costs you 50% of your hardware to redundancy.
Raid 5 is a good trade off.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
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.