Sony Develops Fluid-Filled Bags For Hard Disks

MsManhattan writes "Sony has filed for a US patent on a liquid-filled airbag that cushions hard disks from heavy shocks in portable electronic devices. 'The liquid used could be water or silicon oil,' and 'the electronics would of course be in a liquid-tight case.' Sony expects to use the technology in mobile devices such as cameras, media players, smartphones, and laptops." The article mentions a clever approach Sony has come up with to handle shocks of varying intensity.

Re:Liquid-filled airbag?

[Stonent1]

God beat them to it, our brains are suspended in liquid.

Re:Solid state

[russ1337]

Panasonic have had a gel 'bag' protecting their hard-drives in their Toughbooks for some time. Surely they've suitably protected their IP.

I even managed to find a picture of one on Ebay [ebay.com]

FTA: Why is it called an "air bag" if it is filled with liquid?

Re:Solid state

[Iron Condor]

I don't know about fanfic, but I've gel-mounted HDDs since the middle nineties. This is entirely common in the aerospace industry. As a matter of fact, try running "hard disk gel mount" (without the quotes) through google one of these days for a long list of patents already granted for this idea.

Re:Flash memory?

[OldeTimeGeek]

Camera's have HDD's?

If the camera is carrying one of the several models of microdrives [wikipedia.org], they do. I've always stuck with CF because of write times and storage density, but I know a couple of photographers who like 'em.

Surely a cushion of water wouldn't protect something like a cell phone hitting the concrete

I would assume that the liquid would be considerably more viscous than plain water.

Re:Flash memory?

[CaptainPatent]

Camera's have HDD's?

most of the time no, but almost every patent application attempts to patent the broadest possible terms so in this case if anyone ever (in the next 20 years) decides to incorporate a hdd and wants to add a shock absorber, they have to go through Sony. That is ignoring the fact that this is not patentable, but it's the intent.

Surely a cushion of water wouldn't protect something like a cell phone hitting the concrete

You may be surprised at the amount of cushioning something like this could provide. If the normal deceleration of the hard drive without an insert occurs in 5ms (let's say metal to concrete.) With something like the insert, I would expect the full deceleration to occur over times like a quarter to even a half a second. Just in doing so you have reduced the amount of force induced on the drive by a factor of 50-100.
To demonstrate this in the real world, My last cellphone survived a fall of 70 feet onto a rock bed just because it hit on part of the plastic case that wasn't connected to the motherboard. If it would have hit on the bottom metal connector, it would have had very little or no chance. If instead there were a thin .5 inch layer of gel or liquid in a bag on the ground, I doubt it would have even received the chip that it did.

Re:why...

[bcmm]

Cause it mentioned Sony ;)

Re:Solid state

[hack slash]

The main reason gel filled cushions have been invented is the cost per gigabyte of solid state memory is astronomical compared to harddrives.

Unscientific quick example, 160Gb 2.5" IDE harddrive = £70, 16Gb 2.5" IDE flash memory harddrive = £280. 10x the space for 1/4 the price.

I know the price of flash memory storage is falling, but in comparison the price of harddrive storage is plummeting.

Re:Solid state

[Myself]

Yup, had one of those in my CF-25 [impactcomputers.com] six or seven years ago. I read TFA and don't see anything novel or non-obvious about Sony's claims. Le sigh.