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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."
How about just adding a small USB port that will hook up already existing external drives, and adapting the software just to read from it? I know it defeats portability a little bit, but then you could place in your car those old laptop hard drives in external chassis, filling them with music or movies, and then switching them on your iPod - like old 8-track cartridges?
That would be kinda' neat, kinda retro.
just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
I'd rather see a hard-drive-enabled video cam. No need for tapes, easy editing... don't feel like I have to continue.
And it better be 80 GB, not the measly 4GB like in some recent news...
I really believe that a device like this would win the market... it's beyond me why is nobody making them yet on mass scale.
Me too. 80GB is far too much to need in a small portable device. If you need that much space then get an external USB drive.
I'd be more excited by 20GB microdrives
So this gives approx 22 Days of music. So now if the battery last this long it would be worth it
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
but if you want to put 80gb in my mp3 playing cellphone/pda , please do it quickly
In fact, they are buying LOTS of them... and if the damn thing supported FLAC I would buy it too and load up the whole 80 or 100 or 120 GB it offered (I don't want to hear about iPods supporting AppleLossless -- that is not an open format so I don't plan on using it).
But a HDD based video camera would be nice too.
* Better battery life
I've had my IPod for a few months now, and with a decent amount of usage I have yet to have the battery run out. It came close, once, while driving to Canada from PA.
* No DRM
Like the other poster said, you don't have to use any DRM'd files. You can throw all of the unprotected AAC or mp3 files you want on the thing. Also, Apple does let you do quite a bit with the files. You can share them on I think up to 5 devices now, and you can burn them to cd. I have yet to run into a situation where I wanted to do something with files I bought from the ITMS that I wasn't able to.
* More colors
Well you can buy that hideous U2 black and red IPod now.
* Decent remote
The inline remote Apple sells is pretty decent, it's just frustrating that they make you buy a new set of head phones with it.
* Digital I/O
Not really what the IPod is intended for. It's a portable personal music player, it's not meant to be connected to your home stereo, it's meant to be connected to head phones.
There are plenty of things I would change about the IPod, the first thing that comes to mind is for it to scroll song titles while you are browsing your library. Very often you get several tracks in a row with the exact same name and no way to tell them apart other than listening. This is especially true when it comes to audio books.
-matt
There in only one reason I can think of that small hard drives are not currently used on digicams: power consumption. If the iPod (and its imitators) were not caching info to flash memory and having to run their mini hard drives all the time, the longevity of both the battery and the hard drive itself would be significantly reduced. Unless you are willing to compress all video shot on your camera, the memory format will need to be able to write at a speed of no less than 25 Mbps and flash memory is only now getting up to that point -- and it's ain't gonna be cheap for an application like this, methinks.
Stack a pair of 40gig drives to get to 1cm.
.5cm drives?
I know... battery drain for 2 drives... but you don't have to spool up both drives at once.
You could have separate archives on separate drives.
Really, you could use 3 drives, implement RAID.
All 3 drives could spin when docked.
Photos on one drive, video on one drive, music on 3rd drive.
40gig on
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This would cater to the people who have large music collections and have no interest in storage of photos or a need for a colour screen. Like me.
Given that the iPod Photo has significantly longer battery life with a colour screen, one with a b&w screen could probably increase the 12 hour duration as high as 15.
I'm still not convinced that video is the way to go at the moment, mainly because it's such a niche area. Digital photography only really took off for the average Joe a couple of years ago with the reduction in price of digital cameras to an affordable (and in many cases, dirt cheap) price.
At the moment, I'm looking at the photo iPod simply because I want 60 gig. It's somewhat disappointing to think I'm paying out extra money for the photo functionality that I'll never use.
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I've got both a third gen 20GB iPod, and an Archos AV400 PVR.
I use the iPod solely for music, and the Archos solely for video. If Archos ever got their act together and shrunk the device even a little, integrated a remote and smartened up the sw then I'd drop the iPod in a hearbeat.
I've got a one hour long commute each way. For me that is nothing more productive then watching the overnite market news instead of listening to music. I haven't messed about much with movies and such, but for catching up on the news the Archos can't be beat!
At least until Apple enters that market.
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I know a lot of people say this is too big, to much this or that, but really, if you have over 20GB of storage, you are not really targeting the casual music listener (other than the gullible ones, who think bigger is always better), but people with an interest in having their music collections in a good quality with them.
Of course, the iPod doesn't support lossless compressed formats, but this is about a harddisk that could also be used by better audioplayer manufacturers.
Anyway, a record, ripped in good quality, or even lossless will run between 100MB and 300MB. Let's be conservative and say 150MB per album. That means that on this disc will have space for around 500 albums. (rounded down to be on the save side, if you have only mp3 playback this number might grow to be around 800-900 albums)
500 albums is a medium sized collection for music lovers. (and 800-900 is not excessive) Personally, I would really like to see players with 80GB that are small and have good battery life. I don't care for colour screens and video, image and other capabilities (apart maybe from recording or digital in/out) and I would really like to design a menu for a music player. (is it so hard to have different random modes: artist, album, year, genre? or the ability to schedule songs to play next without generating a playlist?)
Oh well, I guess I'm not a good target market, I want to control how I listen to the music I love...
CC
I have 1,149 CDs in iTunes. My library is about 62 GB.
Step one: Don't use 160 kbps AACs. You can't hear the difference anyway.
Step two: There is no step two.
I write in my journal
Actually, the question in my mind is, why don't we have bigger notebook drives? I believe a 100GB 2.5" drive exists, although it seems to be difficult to find. If they can get 80GB in an iPod-sized drive, why can't I get > 200GB in my notebook?
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