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Data Storage Hardware

4GB HD in Under an Inch 248

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-just-pretty dept.
werwerf writes "In need of hard disk space but not much physical space? Toshiba is developing a sub inch HD capable of holding from 2 to 4Gb. Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!" They expect to be in mass production by the fall. Also, News.com is reporting that Hitachi's 1-inch 4GB drive is in Apple's new iPod mini.
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4GB HD in Under an Inch More

4GB HD in Under an Inch

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  • Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bryan Ischo ( 893 ) * on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:27PM (#7922111) Homepage
    Can someone who has owned an IBM Microdrive comment on the reliability of ultra-small hard drives such as these?

    I've had too many hard drives (of the desktop or notebook size) fail in my day to feel very comfortable about having one in a device as likely to be subject to stress and shock as a digital camera.

    Solid state memory like compactflash just seems so much more elegant than a tiny spinning metal disc with teeny little motors and gears ... but, if these micro drives are reliable enough, then the storage capacity they offer would be mighty attractive.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:4, Informative)

      by R_Harrold ( 669587 ) <robinton@benden.com> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:32PM (#7922165) Homepage
      Reliability is good in my experience, though power drain is horrible. spinning a platter (moving a physicality through space) uses a lot more power than flashing memory cells.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:3, Informative)

      by mr_tommy ( 619972 )
      As an IBM Microdrive owner, they are brilliant. I have the 1 gig model for a Compaq Ipaq that i have, and its worked very, very well for the best part of a year.

      The only annoyance is their slighly prohibitive cost, but as with all new technology of this kind it is to be expected.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      We have owned our 1GB MicroDrive since its early days and it has not failed yet. It must be over 2 years old by now. I imagine dropping it would be catastrophic though, as we never have. 2000+ Hi-Rez pics on a Fuji S602Z just plain kicks ass, never have to worry about deleting pictures.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:34PM (#7922194)
      Never had any trouble with my (IBM) microdrive over the past year-and-a-half -- and it's been dropped at least a few times within that period. (Thankfully, it's not been in my camera on any of those occasions).

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by nacturation ( 646836 ) <nacturation AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:35PM (#7922213) Journal
      This would be a boon for notebooks though. Even if the MTBF is rather poor compared to the larger drives, the size would make it possible to stick perhaps 6 of these into a notebook in a RAID5 configuration. You wouldn't really need hot-swappable, but if a drive did fail you'd have the others picking up the slack. A big red LED could flash on the notebook telling you to pick up a new drive, and the information for the new drive is rebuilt on the fly.

      It might be a bit expensive, but for those looking for a rugged notebook (a la Panasonic Toughbook [panasonic.com] series) this would be great!

      • Re:Reliability? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Bryan Ischo ( 893 ) * on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:46PM (#7922348) Homepage
        I have to say, that is really quite an incredible idea. In my experience the hard drive is one of the most limiting factors affecting performance in a notebook computer. If a RAID 5 array of microdrives was much faster than a single normal drive, and with the added benefit of tolerance to drive failure, I would say that would be pretty sweet.

        Somehow I have the feeling that the added complexity, not to mention the all around unorthodoxy of putting a raid 5 array in a notebook computer, will prevent this idea from ever seen the light of day ... pity, because it's such a cool thought ...

        • Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @08:26PM (#7922718) Homepage Journal
          I'm sure that someone, somewhere, is going to do this. After all, someone went to the effort to make a RAID 0 array using floppy disks!
        • RAID 5 isn't designed for speed as much as redundancy. The parity check add significant overhead to the whole process.

          • Re:Reliability? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by BagOBones ( 574735 )
            Form my research RAID 5 has slower Write performance than a single drive do the the parity calculation, BUT it has faster read performance as long as all of the drives are functioning.

            Raid 0 or 0 + 1 are both faster than Raid 5 any day but 0 has not redundancy and 0 + 1 costs you 50% of your hardware to redundancy.

            Raid 5 is a good trade off.

        • Re:Reliability? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by nacturation ( 646836 )
          RAID5 can be built into the motherboard, so the controller isn't much of an issue. The only added complexity is making sure the drives are wired properly for power and data, and designing around it so that they can be serviced with relative ease. Somehow I think the unorthodoxy of it all would make quite a good selling point! Unique selling proposition and all...

      • Re:Reliability? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Steveftoth ( 78419 )
        Maybe for some but most people are used to large hard drives in their laptop. I bought a laptop last year that has a 40 GB drive. These new drives are only 4, you would need ten of them to equal the size. There is no way that ten small hard drives are anywhere near as reliable as one large one. Even if there is a RAID array to stop the data loss.

        Ten hard drives would be larger then 1 regular one. Probably bigger then 2 regular laptop drives, so why not just get a RAID 1 Array of normal laptop hard driv
        • "There's no way that ten small hard drives are anywhere near as reliable as one large one."

          Of course not. That's why you RAID them.

          Step inside any company that has a pressing need for online data storage -- betcha they're using... *gasp*... RAID. And drives smaller than the 300some odd gigger that you can buy for home!

          Blasphemy!

      • Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Funny)

        by RajivSLK ( 398494 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @09:00PM (#7923021)
        That's a terribly stupid idea. It would never work. In fact all your ideas are stupid. Now go away.

        /me runs off to the patent office with my lawyer in tow.

        P.S. please post any other stupid ideas you may have.
        • please post any other stupid ideas
          Sell groups of 4 of these drives (RAIDed) inside of a small enclosure that has a total form factor of a 2.5" drive. Add a circuit board that handles the RAID and presents the drives to the host as a single drive, so that the host machine/OS doesn't even know it's an array.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by KrancHammer ( 416371 )

      I have to second this opinion. Solid state just seems the intelligent choice to go with in devices subject to any kind of rapid motion (or sudden stops!). The word "elegant" is a good one.
      And as well, I am looking forward to the day a solid-state device replaces hard drive technology for secondary storage.

      • Read up on flash cards and you'll find they are a bit lacking in the rewritability department. Many manufacturers are recommending reformating cards after about 20 or 30 cycles to recover "lost capacity"; fine for digital cameras and other such temporary storgae but not something I'd want on my hard drive...
        • As anecdotal evidence, I've never had to reformat a flash card in the past 3 years or so (and I'm using quite a few).

          However, I suspect that a big chunk of the problem is generated by the FAT16 format that almost all of these devices use. FAT16 is very far from robust or reliable. I believe that using a modern filesystem instead would eliminate a great deal of the "need to reformat" thing.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ePhil_One ( 634771 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:36PM (#7922221) Journal
      Smaller is better I would expect. Smaller arms traveling a shorter distance have less inertia when they impact, so I would expect these will handle shock pretty well. Discounting that, and just examining the general "resistance to impact" of drives over the last twenty years and you'll see a pretty impressive curve.
    • Solid state memory like compactflash just seems so much more elegant than a tiny spinning metal disc with teeny little motors and gears ... but, if these micro drives are reliable enough, then the storage capacity they offer would be mighty attractive.

      I agree, spinning disks are fine in my PC, but in a device that gets tossed around, possibly dropped, and man-handled by airport baggage inspectors, I much prefer a solid-state solution. Not to mention that CF uses less power than a hard drive.
    • I have four Hitachi/IBM microdrives (the oldest is 2 and half years old) and have never had any problems at all. I've even had my camera crash (dead batteries) during writes without trashing the disk. Although I'm not too hard on my stuff, they have been dropped occassionally and x-rayed innumerable times without ill effect.

      Others have found them reliable too. They even been used by NASA on at least two shuttle missions according to this review [dpreview.com]

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by foxtrot ( 14140 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:45PM (#7922339)
      Can someone who has owned an IBM Microdrive comment on the reliability of ultra-small hard drives such as these?

      I do own one. I've had good luck with mine-- even when I was using it in places I shouldn't. (technically, the weather station at Jungfraujoch is too far up to use a microdrive safely.) I'm probably not nearly as polite to my camera as I ought to be, though I know this and it lives on a lanyard instead of plummetting all the way to the ground.

      But the thing that really drove it home was the story of professional photographer Bill Biggart. He didn't survive the collapse of one of the buildings of the World Trade Center. A picture of his Canon SLR digital was on the cover of... Digital Photography Magazine, if I recall correctly. It looked about what you'd expect a camera would look like after being in that situation.

      The article in the magazine featured photographs taken with that camera-- the Microdrive survived.

      -JDF

    • Yes, but I don't take "reliable enough" for an answer. I, and I think allot more people with me, want something that ISN'T affected like normal HDs. However tiny it is, one wrong bump can still damage the platter. Laptops are treated pretty gently ( by average ) because of their price and I've yet to see anyone throw their desktop around. How do those tiny HDs function under stress? Heck, how do any small HDs function under a bit of stress?

      Here's personal curiousity: Has anyone ever had any problems with

    • "if these micro drives are reliable enough, then the storage capacity they offer would be mighty attractive."

      Of course... they already HAVE a 4 GB compactflash card. [brighthand.com] (Available in March)

      Personally I plan on sticking with solid state. No moving parts generally means faster, more reliable, and lower power consumption. Of course, they're more expensive per gig, too. (The 4 GB CFII is going for $1500)
      • However, like most flash ram, it can probably only take 10K writes on each sector. Might not sound like a lot, but for $1,500 it doesn't sound like a good deal.

        You'd be surprised how fast that can wear down, especially if it has a dumb filesystem (fat).

  • 4GB / inch? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) * <chris@swiedler.org> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:27PM (#7922112)
    That's good...for me personally (about average), that works out to about 26GB.

  • ah. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by labratuk ( 204918 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:28PM (#7922124)
    ...Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!

    Bye bye battery life...

    • Re:ah. (Score:3, Informative)

      by afidel ( 530433 )
      Although the IBM Microdrives draw about 2.5-3X the amount of power compared to a memory based CF card their overall impact on a digicam is pretty minimal because the CMOS/CCD sensor and the LCD both draw many, many times more power.
      • I quickly discovered that I saved a ton of battery life on my Canon Powershot G1 by using the viewfinder instead of the LCD. I can shoot all day with the viewfinder, and only an hour or two with the LCD. I want to stick with CF so I can continue with good battery life.

    • Re:ah. (Score:3, Funny)

      by teamhasnoi ( 554944 )
      Bye bye battery life...

      When was battery life here? Did it visit and I missed it? Did it stay with you? It didn't even call me when it was in town! Dirty SOB! I'll never trust battery life again. We're THROUGH!

    • Re:ah. (Score:2)

      by pla ( 258480 )
      Bye bye battery life...

      What battery life?

      I know you meant that as a one-liner, but you've hit a peeve of mine. For example, on 4 NiMH AA's, with a Smartmedia card (ie, solid-state, not HDD), I get at most an hour of actual use (with around 50% flash) out of my C3030z. And that only if I keep the LCD off and take care to turn the camera off whenever I'll pause more than a minute or so between pics.

      Currently, I consider batteries, more than any other single factor, the limitation to most small portab
      • You're not the only one annoyed with battery power. I tried to suggest a battery that would last years [google.com] and not a single person would comment on the technical feasability of the design. All I got instead was a lecture on the "dangers of atomics". What's pathetic is that radioisotopes are not much more dangerous than the stuff already in your batteries. *sigh*

  • No need for CF? Ask the Microdrive makers... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:29PM (#7922130)
    They already make microdrive CF cards in 1-2GB capacities.

    Why do I still use CF cards? Because solid state devices are far more reliable than a HD. I know it won't freeze at low temperatures, seize at high altitudes, or die if I drop it.

  • Don't forget (Score:4, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:29PM (#7922136) Homepage
    It's not how big your hard drive is, it's how much RAM you have. ;)

  • Solid-state devices (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kgbkgb ( 448898 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:30PM (#7922147)
    I think we should be focusing our efforts on advancements in solid-state storage devices.

    The basic technology for HDDs is very old, they're very fragile, they eat a lot (relatively) of power.
    • The basic technology for HDDs is old? Yeah, it dates back to prehistoric times, except for the (electro)magnetic part - After all, they use wheels and levers!

      Saying we should be focusing our efforts on solid-state devices is like saying all the people who are now doing GNOME and KDE should get together and make a single system. It's never gonna happen, and it probably wouldn't produce good results anyway.

      Now, if we only had three or four scientists in the world, yes, I'd rather have them working on soli

  • Its not the size that matters. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Deleriux ( 709637 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:30PM (#7922149)
    Its what you do with it that counts.

    Mind you, I bet you wont be hearing "When im ready for porn, I unveil my 1 incher."
    • Mod parent up, please. +1, First Dick Joke Post To A Microtechnology Story.

      Seriously folks. Dick size jokes are unfunny and inaccurate. If you're so nervous about being able to please a woman, maybe you should ask one what she prefers. In all my days as an objective researcher on the subject, I've never been told "a massive wang...on a guy who won't stop comparing it to a memory card!"

  • be careful (Score:2, Informative)

    by GoatPigSheep ( 525460 )
    Don't forget the drive anywhere! Do you want someone getting 4gigs of your documents?

  • Not just cameras. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fuzzbot77 ( 611247 )
    Just thinking... Thumb drives will be come almost obselete.. Why tranfer data on to slow as hell flash chips. Thumb Hard Drives here we come. Just imagine 2gb storage, USB2 and I imagine cheaper than flash cards.

  • Phew! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:34PM (#7922191)
    Toshiba is developing a sub inch HD capable of holding from 2 to 4Gb....Also, News.com is reporting that Hitachi's 1-inch 4GB drive is in Apple's new iPod mini.

    It's nice to see comments about iPods sneak into damned near every story on /., no matter how unrelated.

    "SCO may not have bought all the IP to Unix, and this has nothing to do with the OS used on the iPod."

    "Verisign Certificate Expiration Causes Multiple Problems, unrelated to the battery problems in iPod."

    "Linksys DVD player w/ WiFi and ethernet, an iPod for video."

    "Ask Slashdot: How Much Broadband Usage is Too Much? Sounds like a song I'd like to download to my iPod!!"

  • Hey baby... (Score:4, Funny)

    by John Seminal ( 698722 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:35PM (#7922202) Journal
    While these swimming trunks might look very tight and small and unimpressive, I can gaurentee you there are 4 gigs hidden down there.

  • Forget DigiCams and MP3 Players... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zapp ( 201236 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:35PM (#7922207)
    A DVD holds ~4.7gb. This sounds almost the perfect size to me for a camcorder. You could record straight to the hard drive, and then transfer the video straight to either a standalone dvd burner, or to your desktop machine and edit/burn from there.

  • Been using a 1GB IBM Microdrive for 3 years now... (Score:3, Informative)

    by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:37PM (#7922233)
    The drive itself in the microdrive is more like 1/4 to 1/2". Why is this new one being toted as the first? Is it somehow different? There are multi-GB microdrives on the market now.

    I've been using a Microdrive in my digital cameras for the past 3 years now. Someone asked about reliability, hasn't given me any problems, but it is of course slow compared to regular CF RAM. Now that CF RAM is so cheap, I've switched to a Lexar 40x 1GB flash card, and keep the microdrive as a backup. The Microdrives were a great compromise at a time when CF RAM was really expensive.

    --Mike

  • Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:38PM (#7922250)
    Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore

    Eh? [looks over at his digicam with 330MB IBM compactflash microdrive]

    Digicams and PDAs have been using microdrives for years. They're up to 4GB these days I think; 1GB is more common, the older 180 is pretty much NLA and the 330 is almost too.

    Furthermore- you've obviously not understood the point of removable media. Most digicams, even if they support USB 2.0 or Firewire, can't move data very fast; one camera(the Kodak 14n) barely manages 1.5MB/sec despite costing five thousand dollars and generating 14 megapixel files(yes, 14). I can nearly max out my CF card using either a PCMCIA, USB2, or Firewire CF reader, but on-camera transfer usually blows, because the processors are very slow, using embedded solutions for JPEG/RAW image compression; the CPU is more and more just a 'supervisor'. Slow clock speeds = slow transfer speeds. More importantly, i can pop out the CF card, and pop in a new one when I fill it up. If I'm a sports or event photographer, I hand that card to a guy who sprints over to the truck and editors start downloading the images while I shoot onto another card.

    And yes, the kinds of people who would need 4GB in a digicam are precisely the kind of people who need to be able to pop ANOTHER 4gb in. Top of the line Canon EOS 1Ds will generate 11+ megapixel files. They get big, fast. Leaf and Phase One now make 11-20MP digital backs for medium format, as does Kodak and now Fuji. The digital backs generate enormous files, to the point that some are tethered-operation only, or come with a unit that attaches to the bottom of the camera and houses a laptop hard drive.

    Your average consumer, and even many prosumers, have absolutely no use for a 4GB hard drive in their camera, and the power requirements mean camera makers would never go for it. A solid-state card is so much more power efficient than any hard drive, it's not funny.

  • What I want to know is. . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by UFNinja ( 726662 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:40PM (#7922272)
    How the hell am I supposed to plug an IDE cable into that thing?!

  • solid state = better (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:41PM (#7922292)
    Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!

    Get your hard drives out of my portable devices. Devices with no moving parts are infinitely better than any that have them. Drives have the following disadvantages:

    (1) Poor battery life
    (2) Disk spin up time
    (3) Shock / impact problems and drive crashes

    You can get 4GB solid state compactflash cards right now (as recently announced by Lexar [lexarmedia.com]). They're merely expensive [google.com]. Expend effort bringing the cost of those down and the market for 4GB mini hard drives will evaporate.
    • Plus I wouldn't want to toss a microdrive into a bag, or stuff it in my pocket or slide it across a desk or toss it to someone else to catch. "I need another card", "here......use this".

      I would have no problem doing all those things with a compact flash card.

  • Smaller size versus price (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dark Paladin ( 116525 ) * <jhummel.johnhummel@net> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:42PM (#7922294) Homepage
    Of course, the nice thing about this is the hope that eventually we'll get that "$150 iPod mini" or some other small form factor device (like a Palm Pilot with a HDD - perfect for my NES emulator....)

    But what I keep seeing is that while the physical size shrinks - 1", 0.85", etc, the space it holds remains fairly constant - 1GB, 4GB, so on.

    Part of the problem I see is that nobody wants to make a really cheap 2GB solution, since "nobody wants 2GB for anything by then". I believe it's why Apple has their iPod Mini at 4GB and won't go cheaper - it's hard to simply find something that small with less capacity.

    Kind of like ordering hard drives these days. I checked the prices on my old Proliant box. It's more expensive to order a 9 GB SCSI drive than to buy an 18 GB. Why? Who the hell wants to make a 9 GB when "everybody" wants to by an 18?

    In the end, perhaps solid state will be the answer - probably in "another year or two". No big hurry, since I already have a 30 GB iPod - but it means my wife will have to wait longer ;).
    • I know the feeling.

      My linux server for my small business had a 4GB SCSI drive as the system drive, and then a bunch of big drives in a RAID array for data. Well, the system drive died one day...just wouldn't boot up. So, I figured, that's fine, I'll go buy a new, small drive, slap that in there, re-install the OS, and I'm back in business. The smallest HDD I could find at any local retailer was 40GB. I had to get it, because I couldn't afford to wait for shipping from an online retailer.
    • Rio Nitrus. Just went looking tonight. 1.5 gig for $200. 20 gig for $329. Ya know, neither of those seems superior than the (mini) iPod.

  • photos (Score:4, Insightful)

    by chunkwhite86 ( 593696 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:45PM (#7922337)
    "Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!"

    Considering that I get over 350 high quality, FIVE megapixel photos onto my 512 MB CF card, how many people really need to store thousands of photos before uploading them to a PC???

    Photo-journalists and "embeded" reporters sure, but why does joe hobbist or grandma need such capacity in a digicam??

    My guess is that until price becomes dirt cheap, the power consumption is proven to be acceptable, and the reliability equals that of CF, that no average person is going to buy these.

    Just my 2 cents.
    • most (paranoid) pjs use multiple smallish cards (256-512) and switch them frequently b/c if you have a 4 gig card which fails and blows a complete day of shooting you're very much SOL in terms of landing a new assignment...

      Actually nowadays the latest is to slap on a wifi-enabled 'bottom' (it attaches to the bottom of the camera) on your Nikon D2H and remote-upload to your ftp server from the field.
    • My guess is that until price becomes dirt cheap, the power consumption is proven to be acceptable, and the reliability equals that of CF, that no average person is going to buy these.

      One issue with flash memory that the microdrive (hopefully) resolves, is the max reads/writes... I think non-volatile memory is still limtied to something like 10k writes, not small, but still much less than you'd want on your main drive for a microlaptop, or uber-pda (or your portable music device... iPod).

      • Repetitive read/write failure can be avoided by limiting the number of repetitive operations done.

        i.e. log to /dev/null or a network port. don't reboot often.

        Also, I think the MTBF is something O(100,000) writes anyways, not O(10,000)
    • Considering that I get over 350 high quality, FIVE megapixel photos onto my 512 MB CF card, how many people really need to store thousands of photos before uploading them to a PC???
      How about when that digicam can also do video? And what about putting one of those drives in your Linux based firewall/router appliance? I'm sure there are hundreds of uses someone will dream up for these drives.

    • Re:photos (Score:3, Insightful)

      by wowbagger ( 69688 )
      How about people who prefer NOT to do any lossy data compression in the camera?

      I would MUCH rather store a full RAW or TIFF image (perhaps losslessly compressed with RLE) and have ALL THE DATA, rather than having to work around the JPEG compression artifacts.

    • Re:photos - And Compression (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Keighvin ( 166133 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @08:29PM (#7922740)
      "...over 350 high quality, FIVE megapixel photos onto my 512 MB CF card..."

      You're right that Joe Hobbiest might not need the amazing capacity this offers, but even relatively proficient digital photographers would benefit greatly from extra capacity at lower prices. The fact that you're putting 5MP (usually 2560x1920) in excess of 350 on a 512MB card indicates you're using extensive JPG compression which is unacceptable for a lot of print reproduction once the noise becomes visible, especially in situations where large color blocks cease to gradiate smoothly because of the lossy compression.

      When using the same resolution in an Olympus E-20n on a 1GB microdrive I can get 110 pictures using the camera's built-in RAW format or 70 TIFF; this absolutely faithful reproduction is quite desirable when you know you'd like to blow up a print after the fact.

    • Re:photos (Score:2, Interesting)

      by lquam ( 250506 )
      As sleepingsquirrel says, if you need to shoot RAW as most pro photogs do, that little 512MB card is going to net you only 25-40 images. If you're shooting a wedding... or sports... or a police booking, you don't want to be worrying about changing cards.

      Now, perhaps wedding photogs might eschew hd based cards since if they lose a 100 images of a wedding they're screwed whereas the news stringer is just going to eat cereal for dinner that night.

      --Len
      • It depends on what you're shooting as to whether you choose RAW or JPEG. My wife and I are pro photographers and the only things we shoot RAW are magazine shoots where they have very stringent resolution requirements. For weddings and the like, nobody orders anything much bigger than an 8x10 or an 11x14. We use the Canon 10D which is 6.3MP, and we can easily print a 20x30 without rasterization on a Frontier.

        Honestly, for wedding candids, or news or sports, I'd rather have CF than a microdrive, because C
        • How do you manage to print a 20x30 print on a machine that can only print up to 11 inch paper?
          • My bad. For 20x30 I think the lab uses an Epson durst large format printer. Honestly, I don't know much about the printing beyonds "we send it to them, it comes back looking like it does on the screen."
  • Toshiba is developing a sub inch HD

    Hard Drive: "I was in the pool! I was in the pool!"

  • Can it be removed?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:51PM (#7922398) Homepage
    As I predicted in a past comment, Apple is indeed using the Hitachi 4gb microdrive. The drive should be hitting shelves sometime next week - there are one or two online retailers who claim to have it now.

    What's more interesting, though, is its price. The lowest price I could find for a 4gb microdrive was well over $500 - TWICE that of the iPod mini.

    If the drive in the iPod is the same thing being sold by Hitachi (ie. it still has a CF connector), you could get this for half-price. Digital camera users would love this...

    This seems to disqualify the notion that the mini is too expensive. I'd say that it's too cheap for Apple to be making any money on it at all. Even IF apple could get the drives for around $200 each, which is the lowest realistic price possible, you've got to remember that there's a lot more stuff in an iPod than the hard drive and Apple still needs to make a profit.

    Could the mini just be a loss-leader to promite the iTMS
    • Apple can get prices that most vendors can only dream about. At the quantities they buy, everything is negotiable.
    • The issue isn't that the ipod mini is overpriced for the components in it. The issue is that it's overpriced compared to the ipod. Let's face it, the ipod is already damned tiny, and it has 15GB for $50 more than the 4GB ipod mini. Unless you are an elf (as in little people, not tolkien elves) you can carry a full size iPod. And, it has nearly four times the storage, just in the base model.

  • Pfah (Score:2)

    by Pflipp ( 130638 )
    What's the use of a sub-inch HD if it's 6 inch tall and 4 inch wide anyway?

  • But How Heavy is it ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Blimbo ( 528076 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @07:56PM (#7922446) Homepage
    I think the weight of these devices should be a listed spec, small size is nice but if its 10X as heavy as a memory stick, well it's still not that usefull.

  • Digital Camera (Score:4, Insightful)

    by owlstead ( 636356 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @08:36PM (#7922797)
    These would be at place in a digital video camera even better. JVC (and probably others) has a few of these very small babies already. And speed and storage space are very important for these kind of camera's.

    With 4 GB you can easily store hours of high quality video. One of the last places where tape is still common is going to bite the dust.

    Just backup media to go. That might be a tough one to crack. For low speed storage it is very economical.

  • Duplicate (Score:3, Informative)

    by arrogance ( 590092 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @09:22PM (#7923196)
    There are almost 100 comments, and no one noticed the dupe [slashdot.org] yet? I guess it's been a few weeks since the original story, but there's nothing new here, folks.

  • Oh well (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Daath ( 225404 ) <(kd.redoc) (ta) (pl)> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @10:55PM (#7923914) Homepage Journal
    Gotta love those iPods! I have a new 20GB version, but I think I would have bought a 4GB version if it was out at the time - so small and so cool :)
    Anyway the 1.8" versions of 40GB sounds cooler! 8mm high - or the 20GB 5mm!

    Anyway the harddisks will be unnecessary [slashdot.org] soon it seems ;) Just think of your computer with a couple of terabytes of RAM - gotta make some of that solid state though ;)
  • The slashdot post says 2-4Gb, however, it should read 2-4GB (as stated in the article)

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