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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."
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
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
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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
"...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.
As in Toshiba, Japan?
No. Actually, it's Toshiba, India now. Haven't you heard? Everything's moving there these days.
Yes, your job too.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
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.
Toshiba is developing a sub inch HD
Hard Drive: "I was in the pool! I was in the pool!"
Yeah Mr Hard dive, but you were sub-inch when you were Hard
http://jesus.everdense.com/
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 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.
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.