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Toshiba Unveils 80GB 'iPod drive'
sushant_bhatia_progr writes "The Register has an article about a new 80GB drive from Toshiba. Toshiba says it will ship an 80GB 1.8in hard drive in Q3 2005 - a year after it introduced the 60GB version that can currently to be found inside the iPod Photo. The 80GB HDD - model number MK8007GAH - comes in a 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.8cm casing. Toshiba will ship a 40GB version - model number MK4007GAL - that's just 0.5cm thick in the second quarter. It's lighter, too: 51g to the 80GB HDD's 62g. Toshiba's current 40GB and 60GB (model numbers MK4004GAH and MK6006GAH, respectively) 1.8in HDDs are 0.8cm thick, so the new drive should make for thinner mid-range iPods.
Both drives spin at 4200rpm, offer an average seek time of 15ms and operate across an Ultra DMA 100 interface. They can take 500G operating shock and 1500G non-operating shock."
I dont think that theese things exists, but you can have a look at www.dpreview.com and see for yourself..
The microdrives are micro harddrives in compact flash form factor.
I've got around 1200 CDs. Even 80 GB is going to be too small ripping with AAC at 160 KBps.
Still waiting...
Okay, I thought the story about only the old people in South Korea using email was funny, and the spin offs of "In Korea only old people do {insert activity here}" were funny for a bit, but you people wanting to get in your crack about old Koreans on EVERY SINGLE THREAD are just not funny and are ruining what was a pretty funny joke in the process.
</RANT>
500G = 4 903.325 m / (s^2)
Assuming you throw your brand new iPod with a speed of 1 m/s (not a very angry throw), if the iPod grinds to a complete halt in 1 / 4 903.325 = 0.0002s, the G-force will be exactly 500G. 3m/s will give you 1500G.
it's an acceleration rate. G = 9.8m/s.
:-)
After a 1s fall, any object will be falling at 9.8m/s (constant acceleration for 1 s, starting at 0, will give that speed). It will also have travelled 4.9m.
If the iPod was stopped, say by the ground, in 10ms (probably in the right order of magnitude. Might be slightly shorter or longer depending the type of ground, whether you have a shock-absorbant casing around it, etc), it would have to take an acceleration of 9.8m/s / 0.01s = 980m/s^2 for 0.01s. That would be an acceleration of 980/9.8 = 100Gs.
So from 5m height, if the ipod falls straight on its side and the shock absorption of that floor + casing stops the ipod in 10ms, the acceleration will be 100Gs. if it stopped in 1ms, it would be 1000Gs.
Feel free to make your own measurements of the time it takes for the ipod to stop
Daniel
Carpe Diem
A one-inch drop onto concrete generates forces of around 200G. A one-meter drop generates between 8000 and 10000G.
Even with flexion of the case, I'd suspect that an iPod falling off a belt would subject the drive to at least 500G.
The disadvantage (for me) is the lack of a very long battery life, which is a common feature amongst most HDD based players, in my opinion, if you only listen to a few CD's each day, and you like the radio, go for a smaller 512mb or 1gb flash based device with a built in radio. iRiver ones seem to fit the bill nicely with battery-lives that dwarf the iPod, but again, they essentially are aimed at different areas of the same market, ask yourself "do I need it?" and base your decision off that.
And hell, pay off you're debts first, you work hard, probably doing a job you would rather not be doing and then you throw away your hard earned cash on interest payments for a credit card with which you bought shit you probably don't really need? Solve that first mate and you'll have more money overall to buy gadgets and gizmos.
Actually, you need to check your math. That would be $13,199.99
Well, you could store 80 gigs on ur new ipod, and the other 9 gig on ur old one :)
With iTunes 4.7 http://www.apple.com/itunes/, you can encode to Apple Lossless Format, which can compress to half the space an uncompressed song would.
I bought my wife a 20 GB iPod (3G) on the strength of the user interface. The iRiver was the strongest competition at the time, and it was not pleasant to use. I've since bought an iPod mini to use at the gym, and the click wheel is even better than the previous design.
There are players with better specs. and lower prices. I have yet to find one that can compete with the iPod design.
Their is an unsubstantiated rumor that Quicktime NG will be released at Macworld in San Francisco in January. Part of the rumor includes: "Support for .ogg, heAAC, and FLAC audio. (these will also be available for playback in new iTunes)." If it comes to Quicktime and iTunes, it will likely also appear for the iPod.
This is just a rumor mind you, but it is not quite as out there as other rumors I have seen. Maybe you should keep your fingers crossed.
Which you'd no longer have to do at 1x speed.
Agreed. However, it'll still take time. Unlike copying a few songs via FireWire to your iPod, you'd be dealing with very large file sizes. Even with FireWire800, it would take enough time to go brew a pot of coffee. (Actually, with a mini-HDD, the transfer time probably wouldn't be that much different even with FireWire400.) If the transfer takes more than a few seconds, it's pretty much the same for me. I start the transfer, and then go do something else. That's probably why the 1x transfer speed doesn't really bother me right now, since I don't just sit and wait for it.
It's not the encoder quality or datastream size, it's the crappy optics and tiny CCDs. The solution to which is exactly the opposite of small.
You missed the entire point of my last post. VX-2000 - DV mechanism + 0.8cm thin HDD = smaller than current VX-2000, with the same quality. You can't debate that. At the moment you can't shrink the size of the DV mechanism, so in order to create a small camcorder, you need crappy (small) optics and a (crappy) tiny CCD exactly as you described. If the DV mechanism could be exchanged by a 0.8cm thin HDD, then you could effectively have a smaller camcorder with the same quality.
Besides, really small camcorders are difficult to hold steady.
All consumer (and pro-sumer) camcorders are difficult to hold steady. The VX-2000 is no exception. As a matter of fact, it has very little to no digital hand-wobble correction, and is susceptible to a shaky shot much more than your el-cheapo handycams, which have (crappy) digital correction.
There probably isn't a large enough market at the moment to create a small camera with a large lens (like the VX-2000 minus the DV mechanism), but I would love to have one. I do amateur interviews, and very often I need to use a crappy handycam because the subject gets a bit un-easy when a huge freakin' camera is aimed at them. The handycams are much less intrusive to the subject. People have suggested in the past that it's the large lens that people find intrusive, but a wide angle lens adapter on a handycam doesn't seem to scare my subjects away, and the lens size is not that different from the VX-2000.
This is something that involves too many factors to call just like that. The iPod is a portable device and has power limitations, so it could be under-driving your headphones, for example; a technically *worse* set of headphones might sound better on the iPod if they're easier to drive.
For the last time, these drives weren't made to run continuously. Ipods load a few songs at a time so the drive only spins for a few seconds per every 20 minutes or so.
Yes, I think you'll find the huge delay between announcement of the 60GB drives and the introduction of the 60GB iPod photo was a penalty from Apple - they'ld probably arranged to buy 100,000 drives or something initially, with the expectation of buying another 10,000 a week or something and an agreement to not sell the drives to anyone else for 12 months. 6 months of not buying those drives while having an exclusive sales agreement would HURT the vendor.
Annoucing Apple will use your hardware before Apple announces it == bad. Just talk to Toshiba and ATi for references.