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.

Comments

Solid-state devices

[kgbkgb]

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.

Re:Reliability?

[ePhil_One]

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.

Re:Reliability?

[Carnildo]

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!

Re:photos - And Compression

[Keighvin]

"...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.