Guinness's World's Smallest Hard Drive Record

ketbra writes "CNN reports that Toshiba has received the Guinness World record for the smallest disk drive for their new 0.85-inch HDD. (Covered on Slashdot a while back) The technology editor from Guiness made the comment that "Toshiba's innovation means that I could soon hold more information in my watch than I could on my desktop computer just a few years ago". "

Comments

Re:Guiness has no idea....

[betelgeuse-4]

I think largest screen and fastest processor (in MIPS not Hz) are already listed.

Re:Good for mp3 players

[Pumpernickle]

They have miniature iPods now, that are quite a bit smaller than the big ones. I don't think it's the storage medium on the iPods that's the limiting factor, a lot of it seems to be the interface - there's a minimum amount of control surface, screen, etc. that people need to comfortably use the things.

seek times & a book recomendation

[morcheeba]

Actually, seek times tend to improve the smaller the disk. It's less mass to move, over a shorter distance. Seagate claims their new 2.5" 10k RPM server-class drive has a 15% faster seek speed than 3.5" drives.

The book The Innovator's Dilemma has a great case study of hard drives, from 14", 8", 5.25", 3.5", 2.5", and beyond and explains why the advantages that each smaller size offers (and why virtually none of the companies that are best at one size manage to sell well into the next smaller size). It's a great book.