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Guinness's World's Smallest Hard Drive Record

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-isn't-that-tiny dept.

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". "

5 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Odd by kneecarrot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I find Guiness World Records for computer parts strange. Everyone knows that all parts are in a constant upgrade cycle. 0.85 today, 0.80 tomorrow.

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    I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.

  2. Imagine a ... by Merlin42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    RAID array of these things. I'm being serious, really.

    Just think in a normal 3.5inch drive case you could probably fit at least 30 of these drives (lets say 1.5inch x 1 inch for each drive with two 3x5 layers, should leave plenty of room for electronics). Given the tiny size of each drive the seek times are probably phenominal) and even if each one wasn't all that fast or even reliable they could be combined to make an incrediably fast drive (using RAID5 or similar internally) with amazing seek times. BUT it might cost an arm and a leg, unless mass manufacturing could bring prices WAY down.

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    Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
    1. Re:Imagine a ... by Have+Blue · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Some reasons this wouldn't work:
      • I don't think the seek time is necessarily all that great. The actuator is also minaturized and the precision of movement required is likely higher than a normal hard disk.
      • The overhead, in processor time in the controller and accounting on the disks themselves, involved in a 30-way RAID configuration would be enormous and probably well above the point of diminishing returns.
      These things really are designed for applications where space is a premium; you could get orders of magnitude more space for the same cost or less with physically larger disks.
  3. Reliability? by hasdikarlsam · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Smaller disks generally mean smaller margins of reliability, whether that's because of missing safeties or just smaller margins for error.

    I bought an MP3 player a while ago (iRiver iGP-100), which has a "reduced" HD. That worked well for a while, but recently I've lost everything from the 300MB mark and up.

    I don't know why this happened, and frankly I don't care; I'm just happy that I have a three-year warranty, and they're letting me upgrade to a newer model which uses a larger, and thus safer, HD. For free. (Apparenly they didn't have replacement drives in stock; the law is the law, though.)

    Well, enough about me. Now, about these drives: Would you trust your data to one of them?

  4. Nice watch by sbeast702 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    As much of a geek as I am, I really could do without 40 gigs on my wrist. Especially since it's not solid state... I can't even imagine the problems this drive will have on small wearables... I have a hard enough time keeping my regular watch from not breaking, I would hate to have to worry about gigs of data as well.