Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

80 hour/4.6Gb Portable MP3 Player

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-you're-talking dept.

atu.com.au">Venebulon writes "A new mp3 player will make its debut at Comdex, November 15. Similarly sized as a PalmPilot, and containing a 4.62Gb internal hard drive, this new device will be able to store 80+ hours of music, with anti-skip features. " I'm going to COMDEX, I guess I'm glad that I finally found something I want to see there (well, besides maybe the porn con next door or Barry White)

1 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Possibilty of "Hybrid" Devices? by Dave500 · · Score: 5

    To be honest I can't say that I am surprised. It is a sad fact, but memory (whatever the type) is simply still too expensive for mass storage, and will be for the forseeable future. I thought somebody might have tried one of those IBM Microdrives first though... I guess they were too expensive too. ;-)

    This leaves us with the usual compromise:-

    1. RAM Based units will have limited capacity, due to the inherent high price of RAM.
    2. Hard-Disk based solutions will have lower battery lives, due to the far higher power consumption of moving parts, as well as being suseptable to mechanical problems (Joggers wil know what I mean :) )

    But what if we brought these two technologies together???

    I propose I hybrid solution. Have a player with about 30Mb of RAM onboard. (Enough for approx 30mins of 160Kbs mp3). Have a small hard drive there as well (whatever GB you need...). When you start playing, the first 30Mb of you favourate album is read off the HDD and placed into RAM. Once that is done, the hard drive may safely be powered down, aka. Laptop style. Should you play all the music in RAM, or change your selection, the HDD is powered up again to read any new data required.
    This would allow an MP3 player to exist that extends battery life by running in "solid state mode" for most of the time, but still gives you a large total storage ability at reasonable cost.

    Or am I just being Stupid/Lame?? (First Post :( )