1.8" USB Portable Hard Drive

Jin-Wei Tioh writes "The folks at BlueSmoke take a look at Transcend's recently announced 1.8" USB 2.0 portable hard drive, the only one of its kind on the market. Roughly the size of a small stack of business cards, it is quite a bit smaller than existing 2.5" drives. It holds either 20GB or 40GB of data and is styled like an iPod."

Nice

[MacFury]

I was waiting for something like this. I wonder how reliable something like this would be if left on/used as a main drive for extended periods of time.

Good for DigVid cameras?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would imagine this could easily power new digital video cameras, and you could actually record in true digital mode instead of on tapes.

cat_man_50

This would be nice

[Daimaou]

I currently am using a 40GB laptop drive in a USB case. it is about the size of a deck of cards (just a bit longer) and requires no exteral power source. It is really handy.

Of course, it would even be better if it was smaller, so I can already feel that compulsive twitch in my hand as it dives for my wallet to fork over some bucks for one of these.

Re:This would be nice

[billygr]

I am using the same from Fujitsu http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030729/fujit su-02.html With one common problem.... Some laptops cannot handle the current that the disk requires to spin up and happens as usual when you don't have the "double" usb cable with you

ipod

[jsebrech]

I've been using my ipod for that for a while now. It's remarkably handy having gigabytes of storage that can be used from most computers without installing a driver, and that will fit in your pocket.

The one annoying thing is that you can't access the music player functionality while it's mounted as a disk.

Re:Its very simple..

[josh3736]

So it turns out the mysterious "????" step #2 has always been "Include a built-in harddrive?" Huh....

On a more serious note, you forgot "include one hell of a battery."

My PDA probably would'nt be able to last for an entire movie, especially since the CPU is at full load for the entire thing. Now you add a faster CPU and having to power a hard drive. The battery is gone in half an hour.

Unfortunately, hardly enough to watch a movie.

External HDs for Linux?

[Unknown Relic]

Are there any external hard drives that have decent support under Linux? From what I've read all of the common ones seem to require a slew of hacks to get working properly, and even then are somewhat quirky. I'd love to be able to plug one of these into a running machine, mount the drive and just have it work. Any of the current offerigns fit the bill? Some of these external drives can be booted to as well, which would be an extra bonus.

storage for my camera

[cloudless.net]

That tiny harddisk sounds nice, but I wish it will have USB host or Compact Flash card reader so I can transfer all the photos from my digital camera to the harddisk. Large CF or microdrives are too expensive, and this sounds like a much better solution.

quality?

[azatht]

I have a question:

How well can the tiny hard drives withstand shakes and magnetic fields? It's seems that there is not much room for shielding.

Re:ADS Pyro DV

[josh3736]

We have a Videonics FireStore [focusinfo.com]. You can hook a DV camera in one end and a FireWire drive to the other side.

It seems really cool, but in pratice, it just sits in the studio collecting dust on top of a VCR.

Tapes work for me. You can always get more of em for cheap and the time moving the DV off tape onto disk isn't all that bad since you can set it and go get something to eat while it does its thing.

Re:Its very simple..

[jsebrech]

nah just hand-crank the hard-drive (connected to a gearing system of course:P

You make that remark in jest, but I'm suddenly wondering whether there are hand-powered generators to power/recharge all our technotools while on the go.