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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". "
Imagine what they are getting themselves into. Will companies now apply for largest screen? Fastest start-up time? Fastest processor? Quietest fan? Largest spam mailing?
At last, a hard drive thats also a suppository. Just what we need after a few too many rounds of Guinness.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You look at the picture and say "Damn, that's a big quarter."
The bigger the inside, the smaller the outside. I've already lost 2 hard drives this way... When will they stop?? Is it too much to ask for something at least one cubic foot?
Is it strange to think that hard drive is cute ?
Not sure why, but it just seems adorable in a little puppy dog kind of way.
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.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
What will we do when our watches have a BSOD?
My computer about a decade ago had a 500 meg HD, now I've got a pocket USB drive with about the same capacity.
To set the record for how many you can eat in a minute using a cocktail stick?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
Was anyone else supremely disappointed to see the word 'Guinness' (possibly mispelled) and find that the article was not about beer, with this being the day before St. Patty's day and all?
(Offtopic +1, Beer)
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Am I the only person that immediately thought, "Wow, 1 bit!".
In the not too far future... [man looks down at watch] "What time is it Pamela?"
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
One more thing to lose. I can't wait for the day when I need tweasers and a magnifying glass to replace a HD.
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.
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
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?
It's one thing to have a book of records that's based on bar bets, and things that just involve getting a bunch of semi-skilled people together to do.
Does anyone care about corporate achievements in the Guiness record books? (other than the corporations, that is).
If they want in to the book, get 1139 people with golf carts, and break the record for longest golf cart parade.
I just think about the Guiness book being about things that are done almost solely for getting into the book, with no significant redeeming qualities other than getting someone's name in print. You know -- longest toenails. Worst smelling shoes -- the types of things that the average person could pull off with a bit of dedication, and not needing a multi-million dollar research facility, and not being directly linked to a company's product development.
How about 'shortest MTBF' for the next hard drive record?
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Thousands of geeks applied to Guinness for creating the smallest linux distro. At the end of the day, only 3 were left standing.
The first hard drive I ever bought was only 5 megabytes (no, not gigabytes). That's way smaller than the one in the article.
Consider two geeks in a pub (yeah, it's a stretch, usually one pint and they're under the table babbling about some OS or Kirk&Spok or making Monty Python references before passing out, ..):
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Am I the only one irritated when improvements get called innovations?
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DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Yes,
We can all be super spies. With gigs of data in a watch, we can sneak into foreign embassies and video tape almost everything in sight.
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.
Everyone in the industry knows that Toshiba hasn't made small hard drives, they've bred huge people
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
I mean, seriously. People used to have to really work hard at breaking records before. And Guinness occasionally had to work hard to find them. Now, it's just a natural, virtually unstoppable progression for all "records" related to technology. Truly lame. The technology secion of Guinness has become a newspaper, effectively.
Get rid of the tech companies and bring back the human freaks! Guinness has closed many really cool (and difficult) categories like "Eating a Bicycle".
I believe the storage capacity of a standard coin is 1 bit, heads or tails. Some coins can also be placed on their edge, producing a third result. This is however considered out of spec, and will generally stabilize to one of the two defined states.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
the competition to see who had the earliest/smallest bit of technology:
"I had a [sinclair, 128k mac, apple, amiga] with a [subtract one unit from previous post]k hard drive, even after I doubled it in size with [crappy software] I wish I still had it, I'd set it up to run a [web server, distributed computing ap] but for now I guess I will have to be satisfied with running it in emulation mode with my [DR-DOS, OS2, BeOS, DOS 3.1] box!
Nice reply to your own post.
There are no such things as those elements to which you refer, and Anser albifrons is the scientific name for the White-fronted goose (which, by the way, lives nowhere near Greece, as it is a native of the northern Americas, concentrated around Alaska and Greenland where it breeds and migrating down to Texas).
Considering these facts, and the otherwise content-free nature of your post, I think a troll moderation was kind.
Thanks for playing, better luck next time.
I'm going to fill up the world's tiniest drive with really really small thumbnail sized pr0n!
e.
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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.
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