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Data Storage Hardware

Toshiba Develops 0.85'' Hard Disk 283

Posted by timothy from the smaller-is-better dept.
onebuttonmouse writes "Toshiba have set a new record for the world's smallest hard disk at a tiny 0.85". Surely this will have some great applications in mobile devices, although the article does not mention power consumption. It'd be great if this made it into the iPod like the 1.5" Toshiba drive that resides in the current models."
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Toshiba Develops 0.85'' Hard Disk More

Toshiba Develops 0.85'' Hard Disk

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  • pfft... (Score:5, Funny)

    by focitrixilous P ( 690813 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:10PM (#7729954) Journal
    It's not how big it is, it's how you use it...

  • Why the iPod? Seriously (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:11PM (#7729957)
    It could benefit all hard drive based music players, not just the iPod.

    • Re:Why the iPod? Seriously (Score:5, Insightful)

      by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:18PM (#7730028) Homepage Journal

      2-3GB on a 0.85" drive isn't much compared to the 30GB+ on a 1.5" drive. That said I wish they'd put more money into developing high density solid state storage devices. 0.85" is cool but it's still a mechanical device with all the inherent problems.

      • Amen (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:37PM (#7730208) Homepage Journal

        high density solid state storage devices

        Having seen 2 GB USB memory keys starting to become available, I have to wonder what the great advantage is of the microdrive.

        I've heard the memory keys are limited by the number of erase/write cycles (to ~10,000) before they wear out, and also limited to data transfer speeds of about 1 MB/s (although I think USB 2.0 is supposed to be better).

        Unforunately, I didn't see any specifications about the read/write speed for this drive, but if it's going to plug into a USB port then it has no practical advantage over the solid state memory device.

        Is there any other reason you'd want a mechanical device like this over solid state memory?

        • Re:Amen (Score:2, Interesting)

          by the_2nd_coming ( 444906 )
          why not use magnetic memory? thy have prototypes for magnetic storage in memory modules for computers, why not use MDRAM for memory sticks? it is not limited by read/writes, and it has no moving parts.

        • Re:Amen (Score:5, Interesting)

          by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:50PM (#7730303) Homepage
          The IBM Microdrive hasn't had any advantages for a while. That is, as long as that's what you are talking about, rather than meaning the 1.5" PCMCIA drives, as found in the iPod. The PCMCIA drives still have plenty of advantages, price and size being among them- I bought a 2 GB PCMCIA Toshiba HD for $70 over a year ago; how much is that 2 GB key drive? That said, that is $35 per GB, whereas with the Microdrive it's hundreds. And you'd need two of them, which is about the size of the single PCMCIA card. :P

          Yes, there's a reason you'd want a mechanical device like this over solid state. Price. That's about it. Depending on the application there may be other factors- if you're doing *tons* of writes then a flash-based solution will pitter out after some time. Any flash will, but usually it's not a big deal, consider how most people use it. But if you were using the flash as swap (as some folks do with their Zauruses), or certain embedded applications, your flash chips could die right quick.

        • Re:Amen (Score:2, Informative)

          by rgmoore ( 133276 ) *
          Having seen 2 GB USB memory keys starting to become available, I have to wonder what the great advantage is of the microdrive.

          Price. Pricewatch lists the cheapest 2GB USB memory key as going for $514 and the cheapest 2GB microdrive as going for $195. In 4 GB sizes I'd expect the microdrive to have an even bigger advantage, but there's no listing for 4 GB USB memory keys, probably because they're too expensive for anyone to think about them.

      • Re:Why the iPod? Seriously (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @10:17PM (#7730919) Homepage
        2-3GB on a 0.85" drive isn't much compared to the 30GB+ on a 1.5" drive.

        Try building an IPOD into a pair of headphones. The advantage of compact flash is you can now store enough data for almost any conceivable portable use. Like when did you last listen to 30Gb worth of MP3 without recharging your batteries?

        The role of an iPod formfactor device is to provide a portable repository from which to fill up the wearable media. No an ipod is too heavy to count as wearable.

        The big problem with these disk ideas is that they end up costing a lot - $500 to $200, there is no low end version like there is for flash rom. I typically buy whatever memory is $60 at costco these days, but then again for photography that is easily sufficient, I do not fill up 256K chips before I can reach my laptop.

  • A drop on the factual side (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NeoThermic ( 732100 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:11PM (#7729963) Homepage Journal
    For those in the UK; 0.85 Inches is a nice small 2.159cm. Although I wonder at the capacity and the sheilding from magnetic interference its going to need to keep away from even small magnetic currents erasing the data...

    NeoThermic

  • 1 gigabyte flash (Score:5, Informative)

    by morcheeba ( 260908 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:12PM (#7729978) Journal
    I wonder how this will compete with Samsung's new one gigabyte (8 GBit) flash. [eetimes.com] With a storage capacity of only 2-3 GB, this drive is only 2 or 3 of these flash chips, so competing on size would be hard. Hopefully it's much cheaper.

    • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) * <charleshixsn@@@earthlink...net> on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:18PM (#7730034)
      Ability to do rewrites to a sector could be significantly different, however. There are recommendations to not format flash to ext3 because of frequent rewrites to the same sectors, which could cause the flash cells to end-of-life pretty quickly, but hard disks don't generally have that problem. (OTOH, neither do vfat systems...not sure about ext2.)
      • Most CompactFlash cards have built-in write conditioning in their controls, which is why it's not much of a problem to write whatever filesystem, including FAT, to them. SmartMedia (really StupidMedia), on the other hand, requires the host to do it.

      • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Ion Berkley ( 35404 )
        It is a concern. NAND flash which is generally the technology that leads the density curve needs special algorithms called 'wear leveling' in the device driver/file system to try to prevent 'hot spots' that cause bits to fail prematurely. the lower density NOR flash devices don't have the problem and tend to be used in application where this is expected to be a problem. That being said NAND flash has been used for many years in this type of application so I would describe it as an already solved problem. Gi

      • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:5, Informative)

        by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @09:07PM (#7730427) Journal
        I think concerns about flash memory wearing out are usually overblown. I see flash cards advertised as having a minimum lifetime of 1,000,000 rewrite cycles. Suppose you formatted the card as ext3. Even if you wrote to the card once every minute around the clock, and it wrote to the same sectors each time, it would take more than two years to get up to a million writes. And who writes to their flash card every minute? Maybe you wouldn't want to use it as your permanent home directory for a knoppix install you used every day, but for any other use, I'd say that it's unlikely you'll get up to 1,000,000 writes anytime soon.
        • Oops. Did I say "more than two years"? I meant "almost two years". 22.8159105 months to be exact. [google.com]
        • Where are you seeing these 1,000,000 write cycle flash cards? 100,000 seems to be the norm from what I see.

        • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:3, Informative)

          by Cecil ( 37810 )
          For ext2, what you are saying is true. ext2 is a plain, boring, vanilla filesystem. ext3 is journalled. Which is why it is ext3 that is a concern.

          With default settings, ext3 syncs the journal every 5 seconds. Automatically, without stopping. The journal being located in the same place on the card, of course.

          For 1 million rewrites, this would kill your card in no less than 138.8 days. So, 4 months. I don't think that lifetime is still looking so great.

          • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Sloppy ( 14984 ) * on Monday December 15, 2003 @11:52PM (#7731599) Homepage Journal
            What occurs to me, when I read stuff like this, is that we still don't have a lot of diversity in filesystems. Ext3, Reiserfs, XFS, JFS.. all written for tradeoffs of reliability vs various different types of performance. But when was the last time you heard of a filesystem that was designed to not write to the same sector over and over?

            Me neither.

            There's still a frontier out there, and room to innovate and make one's mark.

            • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:5, Informative)

              by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @02:22AM (#7732368) Journal
              Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are several linux filesystems suitable for embedded work, and they are designed for flash-card environments. There's cramfs which is a read-only compressed filesystem so you can cram as much stuff as possible into limited Flash space (to upgrade you just re-flash the entire filesystem with a new cramfs disk image, good for simple devices that can be upgraded with new ROMs). There's ramdisks or RAMFS to complement cramfs and make a usable Linux system where nothing at all is ever written to Flash. There's also JFFS [axis.com] which is a journaled filesystem made explicitly for Flash devices, which does try to adapt to Flash's weaknesses. It is used on iPAQs and other handhelds as the main filesystem.

      • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:3, Interesting)

        by nathanh ( 1214 )

        There are recommendations to not format flash to ext3 because of frequent rewrites to the same sectors, which could cause the flash cells to end-of-life pretty quickly, but hard disks don't generally have that problem. (OTOH, neither do vfat systems...not sure about ext2.)

        Your comment about ext3 (and ext2) is correct but VFAT is not immune to the frequent-rewrites problem. The FAT itself (basically a linked list stored as an array) will have frequent rewrites and there is no feature in VFAT to use alt

    • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:4, Informative)

      by randyest ( 589159 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:21PM (#7730059) Homepage
      The company expects each drive to cost around 30,000 yen initially, but projects that mass production will push down the price to less than 10,000 yen within a few years.

      Yen30,000 is about 278.497 USD, Yen10,000 is about 92.8326 USD

      How much is that 1GB flash?

      • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:4, Insightful)

        by pbox ( 146337 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:32PM (#7730163) Homepage Journal
        300 USD might buy you 3GB flash after some rebate crap. By the time this product comes out in 1-2 years, the final price will likely to be less and just below equivalent flash capacity. See what happened to IBM Microdrives vs. CompactFlash... It is not earth shattering invention, just normal evolution. Now 30 GB in that size, that would be somethin'.

    • Re:1 gigabyte flash (Score:3, Informative)

      by C10H14N2 ( 640033 )
      It won't. Current pricing of compact flash memory in the 1GB range is about $300. At 10Y:1$, getting twice the space but on rapidly spinning disks on a handheld device prone to frequent bumps and drops is not going to be very attractive--especially as if you need that extra space, you can buy whatever sized CF Card suits you, so if you really only need 64MB, it'll cost you thirty bucks instead of three-hundred. In my digital photography experience, I found it MUCH more convenient to buy a couple 256 and 512
    • How come no one ever mentions 4GB compact flash cards [lexarmedia.com]. It's sad to see so many "Slashdotters" who think it's still 2002.

  • So much porn... (Score:5, Funny)

    by scosol ( 127202 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:13PM (#7729980) Homepage
    in such a small place...

    God bless technology!

  • Microdrive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by momerath2003 ( 606823 ) * on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:13PM (#7729981) Journal
    If any of you were wondering about "The 1-inch HDD developed by the US affiliate of Hitachi Ltd," that is the same as (what was) the IBM MicroDrive [hgst.com]. IBM's hard drive section [ibm.com] was purchased by Hitachi.

    Also, it says that the Hitachi 1" hard drive was "released in November," but I know that the IBM MicroDrives have been around a lot longer than that. Maybe it's just that they shrunk a little and grew in capacity.
    • The Microdrive "1 inch" drive actually uses 1.3 inch platters, IIRC. It's a bit to large to want to put into a tiny mobile phone. This 0.8" thing should fit more easily.

  • The thing I find interesting about this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foxtrot ( 14140 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:13PM (#7729982)
    ...is that a Microdrive, which I believe is what they're referring to by "1 inch" hard disk drive is too large for cellphones, according to the article, but somehow, this .85 inch one isn't. That's not a huge difference in platter size. Is the associated electronic equipment in this one notably smaller? The article doesn't say, but that's the only thing I can think of-- .15 of an inch (that's shy of four millimeters for y'all metric folks) doesn't seem like it would be a deal-breaker.

    Not that it really matters to me. As long as my phone has a vibrate mode, I don't think I want a hard disk in it...

    • Re:The thing I find interesting about this... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:21PM (#7730054) Homepage Journal

      which I believe is what they're referring to by "1 inch" hard disk drive is too large for cellphones

      Whenever I read about hard disks in a cell phone I always wonder about the gyroscope effect making the phone hard to manage. Power up a standard hard drive and try turning it perpindicular to the spindle and see what I mean.
      • Well, given that the platters in these things are significantly smaller, I suspect the effect isn't nearly as noticeable.
      • You can be certain that this tiny little drive will have negligable gyroscopic effects.

        The angular momentum is (for a point)
        L = M x R^2 x omega

        So scales as the square of the disk radius. The radius of a standard 3.5" disk is probably about 1.7", the radius of this new disk is 0.425". The small disk will therefore have about 5% of the momentum of the larger disk (assuming all else is equal).

        Also, all else is not equal: the minature disk will spin slower for sure. 5400RPM or less.

      • Whenever I read about hard disks in a cell phone I always wonder about the gyroscope effect making the phone hard to manage.

        I imagine that, for power saving purposes, the hard drive would spin slowly, and be spun down most of the time anyway.

        This raises another question, however: When the mobile phone starts its hard drive, would the phone start to spin?

      • Re:The thing I find interesting about this... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by furiousgeorge ( 30912 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:42PM (#7730253)
        >>Whenever I read about hard disks in a cell
        >>phone I always wonder about the gyroscope
        >>effect making the phone hard to manage.

        What....? Those millions of peoples with iPods seem to be able to power them up and turn them without falling over.

        Current implementations demonstrate the gyroscopic effects aren't a concern (except possible for the engineers designing them). Smaller disks will make it even less so.

    • Re:The thing I find interesting about this... (Score:5, Informative)

      by dhovis ( 303725 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:41PM (#7730246)
      Well,

      Remember that area goes as the square of the diamater, so this new hard drive is only 72% of the area of a 1 inch drive. They don't mention the thickness, but if it is thinner than the 1 inch drives, then there is better than 30% savings on volume. That is nothing to sneeze at.

      As long as my phone has a vibrate mode, I don't think I want a hard disk in it...
      One thing to remember is that the smaller the radius of the hard disk platter, the less sensitive it will be to vibrations anyway. That is why iPods are relatively robust (that and good caching, so the hard drive is rarely moving anyway).

  • 0.85 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rkz ( 667993 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:13PM (#7729987) Homepage Journal
    This is great for seek times, high speed applications like watching hi-res movies from a hard drive this small could mean smooth tracking through the film without losing audio sync, a problem which affects larger drives (3.5").
    Forget the iPod, this sort of drive would do nicely in a handheld/pocket divx player.

    • Re:0.85 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:32PM (#7730156)
      ????
      Could you explain wtf this has to do with access time?
      If you can track to a film with audio sync or not is purely dependent on the container and the audio codec. Ogg or avi mit vbr mp3 can create problems, seek times dont (your blockindey is already in hd-cache, and if you dont jump into an i frame, decoding a lot of b/p frames (up to 11 in mpeg2 up to 100s in mpeg4) will take a lot longer than seek time.

      But even if seek time would be important for that stuff: Your 0.85" hd will have a lot worse seek time than any normal 3.5" drive. Because of the simple fact that you cant fit very powerfull magnets / coils in such a small package.
      If your reasoning would be true, we would have servers running of microdrive raids for years...
    • I used to use a little 2 GB PCMCIA hard drive- like in the iPod- in my PDA, a Jornada 720. It was awesome- 2 GB of storage for a piddly $70- next to nothing compared to the price of similar storage in CF or SD cards. I wish my newer PDA, a Sigmarion III, had PCMCIA for this puppy- with a faster CPU and a bigger and better screen (5" 800x480 rather than 640x240 [compared to 320x240 for PocketPCs) it would be great for watching DivXs. It seems to decode them well enough with my experiements. A shame no med
    • Can you please explain the sig? Anti-SCO magic eye illusion. Only pops up in firebird, not CURL nor IE... and links to a nasty goatse...

      As for being on topic: DivX player will somewhat depend on the reading speed of the drive. You'd improve performance by low-distance needed for the needle to travel, but lose some with micro-sized parts I'd imagine?

  • Usage (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CrystalChronicles ( 706620 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:14PM (#7729991)
    I'd love to see this used on a digital camera. Imagine 2 gig of sapce to space your 5 megapixel shots. mmmm Price might be prohibitive at first but what new technology isnt?

    • Re:Usage (Score:5, Informative)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 ) * <glandauer@charter.net> on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:30PM (#7730143) Homepage

      It's already available, at least for more expensive cameras. You can get an IBM microdrive in a Compact Flash Type II form factor, which is a bit thicker but otherwise dimensionally compatible with the regular Compact Flash cards. Less expensive cameras aren't designed to accept both Type I and Type II, but many of the high-end ones- including all of the Digital SLRs, AFAIK- are. The extra capacity is obviously really useful when dealing with a 6+ megapixel camera that may want to save pictures in raw (i.e. not compressed) format. The availablility of hard drive storage is one of the key things that keeps Compact Flash relevant; it's bigger and clunkier than other card types, but at the very high end it can hold way more than any of the others.

    • You can already get something like that. Hitachi sells Microdrives [hgst.com] which can be used in some cameras. Check the compatability matrix for drives and cameras.

    • Re:Usage (Score:5, Funny)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:40PM (#7730232) Homepage
      Ack! no thanks....

      I'll take my pocket full of 256 meg CF cards.

      If I lose,smash,wash one, I lose 256Meg of storage and not much money or photos lost.

      The last thing I want is to spend my weekend in disneyworld taking photos of my kids pissing on mickey, screaming anti-disney slogans and getting dragged off by the goofy police and lose every one of them due to media failure.

      for holding divx files for me to watch on my Zaurus? yes! important things like digital photos? nope.
    • Just go buy a 2 [ritzcamera.com] or 4 gig Compact Flash card. [ritzcamera.com]

      They read/write significantly faster and have no moving parts. They're also removable etc. etc

      Ok, so the 4 Gigger is a bit pricey ;-).
    • Sure, on still pictures, this is plenty of space. But a DVD is ~4.7GB - is 2-3GB enough for good video recording, or will you also have to haul around an iPod to upload your pictures to?

  • Size Matters? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fmlug.org ( 695374 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:15PM (#7730001) Homepage
    Great so I can loose this sucker just like I keep loosing that tiny cell phone I had to buy. Or better yet they will prob combine the two and make the worlds smallest cell with a HD. So then I can loose both at the same time. How small do we need things, really. I thought women always say "size matters!" if so the geeks are going in the wrong direction.

  • Wait, wait, wait... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BAM0027 ( 82813 )
    There have been a few press releases about significant reductions in form factor, but the storage capacity is also much less. Just hang out until they get as fast, as capacious, and as cheap.

    Of course, when they do,...

  • Imagine (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:20PM (#7730051)
    100 of these crammed together. They could hold about 200G and only be about 5 times the size of a normal drive!

  • 4GB MIcrodrive (Score:4, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:23PM (#7730078)
    When I RTFA, I noted a related story on the new Compact Flash 4GB Microdrive [nikkeibp.com] and found a randomly chosen supplier [memorysuppliers.com] with more specs and claims that these are in stock now. Just think, a DVD worth of data on a single CF card. Now I can start taking all my digital pictures in RAW format.

  • 0.85inch drives in iPods? (Score:3, Informative)

    by joekra ( 722518 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:27PM (#7730107)
    These drives are not to be introduced until 2005... so will not find their way into iPods anytime soon...

    that being said, there are circulating rumors of Smaller/Cheaper iPods [macrumors.com].

  • Imagine.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ibanez ( 37490 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:27PM (#7730110)
    a REALLY small beowulf cluster of...oh nevermind....

  • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Low power consumption (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It should have quite low power consumption.

    All else being equal, the power consumption of similar hard disks should be approximately proportional to the square of their radii.

    Of course, friction is a funny thing, and the engineering may need to be different for a small device, so YMMV. In general, smaller disks will use less power.

  • Ooooh . . . GPS application (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StefanJ ( 88986 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:30PM (#7730137) Homepage Journal
    Imagine a handheld GPS locator with every city map!

    Or that you can set to record a timespace waypoint every five minutes.

    You could tie one of these to your outdoor cat and see how many owners he has . . .

    Stefan

  • Poor man's computer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by King Bo Bo ( 729843 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:32PM (#7730161)
    This is BIG news. It looks like cell phones will become the poor man's computer. How many billions of people live in China and India again? Over two billion.

    • Re:Poor man's computer (Score:4, Informative)

      by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Monday December 15, 2003 @10:33PM (#7731023) Homepage
      Heh. haha. and heh again!

      I think you're confusing China and India with more affluent Asian nations. Yes, darn near everyone in Japan has a cell phone. But in China or India? What the hell are you thinking, man! Plenty of those people don't have electricity at all, let alone a really expensive cell-phone with a really expensive tiny hard drive.

      How cheap do you think these tiny drives will be? The same HD space in a bigger drive (esp if second hand) is a fraction of the cost. Seems to me that older technology would be for the "poor man's computer," rather than the newest and most expensive stuff.
    • China, despite having the world's largest mobile phone market (~250 million users), the growth is now mainly in the lower end of the market, so innovations like these will take a long time to penetrate.

      http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-11/10/ c on tent_280187.htm

      However, I remember reading that most people in Japan have already using their mobiles to access the Internet by default. A lot of Japanese don't even have home Internet access, if I recall correctly, because mobile access has been so good.

  • some day (Score:5, Funny)

    by khuber ( 5664 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:40PM (#7730235)
    computers may be small enough to fit in a single room.

    • Re:some day (Score:3, Funny)

      by freeweed ( 309734 )
      I know you're trying to be funny, but consider this:

      You're posting to a place where a sizable chunk of the readership probably has more than a roomfull of computers :)

  • I would so lost that (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Unregistered ( 584479 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @08:46PM (#7730278)
    If the iPod gets an smaller, it ould be too easy to lost, imo. Unless they leave the device the same size and put the extra space to use for the battery. That would be pretty sweet
    • Exactly. Additionally, the iPod is already at a pretty sweet spot for portability and usability; making one substantially smaller would probably mean rethinking its much-lauded UI. I don't think I want them making the screen or controls smaller. If they can make the inner workings smaller, great; just keep it in the same size case, and use the internal space savings for a bigger battery.
  • Why wait for Apple? Creative [amazon.com], Rio [amazon.com], and RCA [amazon.com] are already using 1" 1.5GB Cornice drives [corniceco.com] in some tiny mp3 players that make the iPod seem oversized. Cornice says they will have a 5GB model around the middle of 2004...
  • Smaller, faster, better! This is cool stuff. Soon they're going to be pushing the physical limits of manufacturing!

    Does anyone know if there's a company working on applying MEMS fabrication to similar devices?
    =Smidge=

  • Power Consumption... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Most of the power used by a hard drive I would presume is used to spin the platters. With a mass and diameter this low, spun at the same rpm as standard drives the power used would be:

    a) huge
    b) average
    c) miniscule
    d) I can't think for myself and must be explicitly told.

    Come on, at a tiny 0.85" it has to have really really low power consumption.
  • "Toshiba have set a new record for the world's smallest hard disk at a tiny 0.85".

    Wowsers, just 0.85"! One-dimensional storage is teh FUTARE!!!1

  • Instead of smaller... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @09:11PM (#7730453) Journal
    ... how about making them shock-proof?

    No matter how many people say they jog/run with their iPod fine, there's no denying that the sucker locks up for a whole lot of people.

  • "Mine's smaller than yours!"

    "No, mine's smaller"

    "No, mine... oh, wait, what am I saying!"

  • Picture here (Score:4, Informative)

    by News for nerds ( 448130 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @09:24PM (#7730556) Homepage
    Here's the picture [impress.co.jp] and report(Japanese) [impress.co.jp].
    The small picture posted in the article [impress.co.jp] will be more real-size for most people.
  • What is with that font? Tons of Far-East sources use that same strange font in all English-language printing. I first encountered it as a kid, on the back of some Chinese sandpaper. Does anyone else notice these things? Or am I nuts?

  • Dimensions (Score:3, Funny)

    by JewFish ( 315210 ) on Monday December 15, 2003 @10:05PM (#7730844)
    Just telling me one dimension, 0.85", is useless. We live in a n-dimensional world. I forget what that n is, but last time I heard a nuclear physicist speak it was over 7. So tell me its the Length, Width, Height, Diameter, Radius or something useful.

    I had to RTFA to find out it was diameter, what kind of /.'er does that make me? having to RTFA uck.
  • It's not the size, but how you use it?

    I didn't believe it either....

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