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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". "

9 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? Where's it go? by basil+montreal · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  2. Adorable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. Re:Guiness has no idea.... by HD+Webdev · · Score: 5, Funny

    Smallest market share?

    --
    This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
  4. 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?

  5. Re:Smallest Drive by damien_kane · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Wow, 1 bit!"

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

  6. I miss the bar bets. by oneiros27 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  7. A Day Early? by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Funny
    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.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  8. Guinness is the new Moore's Law bitch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  9. Re:Guiness has no idea.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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