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

Guiness has no idea....

[bobthemuse]

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?

Re:Guiness has no idea....

[HD Webdev]

Smallest market share?

Re:Guiness has no idea....

[Anonymous Coward]

While smallest, largest, fastest, etc are very short held titles in computers, first is an important distinction.

An apprpriate distinction for GBWR:
Toshiba Claims First Harddrive to Float on the Head of a Guiness

At last....

[Kenja]

At last, a hard drive thats also a suppository. Just what we need after a few too many rounds of Guinness.

You know you're a geek if...

[Austerity Empowers]

You look at the picture and say "Damn, that's a big quarter."

Re:You know you're a geek if...

[sepluv]

Glad I'm not the only one.

As I'm in the UK, I thought "they have very big coins in the US don't they?"

Huh? Where's it go?

[basil montreal]

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?

Adorable

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Odd

[kneecarrot]

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.

Re:Odd

[tanguyr]

tomorrow they'll put 16 gb drives *inside* quarters.

Already...

[Anonymous Coward]

My computer about a decade ago had a 500 meg HD, now I've got a pocket USB drive with about the same capacity.

So who will be the first.......

[MrIrwin]

To set the record for how many you can eat in a minute using a cocktail stick?

What a let down...

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

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)

Imagine a ...

[Merlin42]

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.

Re:Imagine a ...

[Have Blue]

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.

Reliability?

[hasdikarlsam]

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?

Re:Smallest Drive

[damien_kane]

"Wow, 1 bit!"

Being about the size of a quarter, wouldn't it be 2 bits?

I miss the bar bets.

[oneiros27]

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?

That's nothing...

[fmaxwell]

The first hard drive I ever bought was only 5 megabytes (no, not gigabytes). That's way smaller than the one in the article.

A Day Early?

[ackthpt]

Nearly everyone knows that St. Patrick's Day is the 17th, and a day many people tip a pint of Guinness in tribute, in a pub, for which (ta-da) the Guinness Book or World Records was created to settle bets and disagreements.

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, ..):

Geek 1: "So then I visualized a tiny Beowulf cluster with a slew of IBM microdrives, the smallest drives in the world and it was..."
Geek 2: "Whoa, Cowboy, Toshiba has the smallest hard drive in the world."
Geek 1: "No, it's IBM, you're wrong romulan breath!"
Geek 2: "NOT! It's Toshiba!"
Barmaid: "Hold on boys, I'll get the book to settle this."
Geek 1: "Awe crap, OK, so it's Toshiba!"
Geek 2: "Facial burns on you!"
Geek 1: "So I filled out a request for the parts."
Geek 2: "What did purchasing say?"
Geek 1: "They said they couldn't understand it because I filled it out in spanish."
Geek 2: "Ah ha! They didn't expect the spanish requisisition!"
Barmaid throws the book at them.

Not actually innovation

[leandrod]

Am I the only one irritated when improvements get called innovations?

Guinness is the new Moore's Law bitch

[Anonymous Coward]

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 plan on...

[enrico_suave]

I'm going to fill up the world's tiniest drive with really really small thumbnail sized pr0n!

e.

Re:Smallest Drive

[Chris Burke]

Being about the size of a quarter, wouldn't it be 2 bits?

Which is what you need to encode all possibilites of getting a shave and/or haircut, coincidentally enough.