1" Hard Drives in Cellphones on the Rise

Tomo Hiratsuka writes "The imminent 10Gb 1-inch hard drives we've been hearing about have been well covered but the maker, Cornice, reckons its product could end up in over 70 million cellphones by 2009. Kevin Magenis, one of the company founders, isn't shy about pointing out that this is 30 million units more than predicted DAP sales."

Comments

define: DAP

[Caspian]

I had to think about this for a moment. "DAP" means "Digital Audio Player". (e.g. iPod, etc.)

I believe this is the first time this term has appeared in a SlashDot article. (Perhaps a SlashDot Glossary would be a good idea?)

whats the fascination with stuff that breaks?

[Shivetya]

I do not want a harddrive in my phone. My phone gets more abuse than any other gadget I have. Granted its cheaper than using flash but hell I would rather pay for something that isn't going to possibly be toast when it bounces once off the pavement.

Re:whats the fascination with stuff that breaks?

[__aammuz5019]

I agree totally with not wanting a hard drive in my cell phone, but... has anyone tried to buy a cell phone *without* a camera in it lately? I don't want a camera in my cell phone either, because I work in the defense industry and I cannot take my phone into many buildings due to security restrictions. But, when I tried to purchase a cell phone without a camera, I found my only choice was a klunky offering that was too big for me and looked like it was several years old in design. I fear that the idea of having a hard drive in one's cell phone will "catch on," and shortly after, one will not be able to find a cell phone without one. Sigh! smp

Re:whats the fascination with stuff that breaks?

[mnemotronic]

Very small drives are ... a little different. You're probably thinking of Z-axis damage, where the heads "slap" into the media after the drive is dropped "face down". What's kewl about these tiny drives is that everything (including the head or heads) is smaller and lighter, with less mass, which means less momentum, which translates into fewer chances for this kind of damage. Another way to prevent damage is use an accelerometer which the embedded F/W will use to sense impending doom and park the heads on a non-data portion of the media, or to remove the heads from the media entirely (ramp loading).

But in the end, you're right - Flash is much more tolerant of these kinds of environments. Yes it's expensive, but there's that Moore's Law thing that, for a few years now, has given us smaller, denser, and cheaper circuitry. There's also the limited number of rewrite cycles, but in the sub 1.8 inch drive arena, I think (MHO) Flash will be the ultimate winner. Until then, those of us using micro drives thank those of you who fork out the Really Big Bucks for Flash-based products (like the Nano) - you're helping drive down the cost for us all.

Re:What do I need a hard drive on my phone??

[Dionysus]

The drives shows up as USB storage devices (at least they do in the newer Nokia models). You can just access them that way and copy the music or whatever over. That's what I do.

Of course he's going to predict that

[DrSbaitso]

I read an article about Cornice a while back (upon further googling, here it is). They were approached by Apple to be the exclusive supplier of HDs for the iPod Mini. They ended up turning Apple down in order to focus on the phone hard drive market. Time will tell how smart of a decision that was, but if there's one thing you can say about their CEO it's that he's got some brass ones. I think it was a pretty stupid move, but then Apple would be done with this tech by now (only flash in the Nano, bigger HDs in the 5G iPod) so maybe they will sell a lot of phones with hard drives and become rich.

"... by 2009..."

[Slartibartfast]

Huh? Why, in the world, have a 10 GB HD, when -- by 2009 -- you'll be able to have (for a slightly higher premium) 8 GB of flash? Lessee:

Flash uses less energy
Doesn't need to spin up
Won't "crash" [flash can have its own problems, but the heads ain't one of 'em]
Can be easily extracted and plugged into external devices
Etc.

I love hard drives, but the super-duper-really-small stuff has never (and, IMHO, will never) catch on; flash has that pretty much sewn up.

MiniSD is already better

[michaelmalak]

It is already possible to get (I've had one for a month) 1GB of RAM in the mini-SD format, not to be confused with SD, which itself is smaller than CompactFlash. The miniSD is about the size of a fingernail, and that adapter you see at the bottom of the sandisk.com page is a slipcase to bring the miniSD up to the size of SD.

By 2008, the projected release date of the 1" hard drive, I'm sure miniSD's will be up to at least 4GB if not 8GB, without the power drain of spinning platters, without the seek and latency, and in a much smaller form factor.

We can see from IBM's CompactFlash hard drives how limited the market is -- basically photographers who can't afford the time to change their "film". But the trend is to smaller and more personal devices, and the market for tiny hard drives will be even smaller in 2008.

There are modern phones without cameras

[daveschroeder]

Your issue is exactly why enterprise and government wireless providers offer versions of modern phones without cameras, such as the no-camera Treo 650NC offered by Sprint.

Re:What's interesting about this...

[Smidge204]

I hope that post was a troll. I don't know what's worse... the fact that none of what you said makes sense or the fact that apparently people think it's correct.

For the mods who rated that post "informative" and "interesting":

Microwaves have wavelengths measurable in centimeters. This makes them very bad for data storage. The whole reason the industry is trying to move to Blu-ray and similar technologies is because blue colored light has a much SHORTER wavelength than the traditional red colored lasers used in established data storage devices. The "size" of the bit being stored (and therefore the number of bits you can store in a given area) is directly proportional to this wavelength.

The wavelength of the microwave radiation emitted by the phone is roughly 35 centimeters. The wavelength of light used in CD drives is roughly 0.000078 centimeters. That's nearly 13000 times larger! So you'd think you could store 1/13000th the data in the same spot using microwaves than you could fit using regular CD laser tech.

All this ignores some other very serious technical issues, of course... like how the unfocused microwave energy emitted by the antenna (or anywhere else in the phone) is directed and focused towards the HD platter, and how the microwave energy is able to interact with the platter to read and toggle magnetic bits considering microwaves bounce right off metal surfaces.

------------------

The size of the R/W heads is NOT a limiting factor.It is easy enough to use MEMS technology to make them only a few billions of a meter wide, so they can be built plenty small enough. The real limiting factor is how closely you can back the magnetic regions that encode the data before they interfere with each other and lose the ability to retain their state.

I need another cup of coffee...
=Smidge=

battery life

[stud9920]

moving parts is just what my anemic battery needs.

Re:Who would need this?

[dcsmith]

Who has that many friends that they need a 10GB hard drive to store all their phone numbers?

Yeah, becasue no one wants to use their phone for anything except making and receiving phone calls. Except taking photos. And surfing the internet. An sending e-mail. And, these days, watching streaming video. Besides that, nothing at all. Except for rest of the stuff I missed.