Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Cornice Unveils 1" Hard Drive for Under $100 US
Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 09:16 AM
"Cornice Inc of the United States revealed a 1-inch hard disk drive (HDD) designed for consumer electronics for an OEM price of less than US$100. Cornice will launch mass production of the Cornice Personal Storage, the 1-inch HDD with a recording capacity of 1.5GB some time before the second quarter of 2003. According to the company's estimate, the retail price of music player accommodating this HDD will be US$199 at volume production.
Taking this estimate under consideration, Nikkei Electronics assumes that the OEM price of "Cornice Personal Storage" is expected to be below US$100. This price is much lower than the 1GB Microdrive, provided by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc of the US, whose OEM price ranges US$170 to US$210. Cornice reduced the number of parts largely to cut price. To reduce the number of parts, it substantially changed HDD's architecture."
Now before you get too excited, it's not removable, and it won't fit in a CompactFlash slot. It's designed to be included inside a device. Once I read that, I wasn't nearly as excited about it. Hard drives will always be more power-hungry than solid state memory (CompactFlash, SD, etc.), and 1 GB really isn't that big if it's the only storage on the device. Granted, this might allow companies to release MP3 players like the iPOD as 1/4 the size, which would be cool, but the impact on the PDA world will likely not be felt unless the power consumption is very, very low.
Even then, having had my 1 GB Microdrive die on me one month after the warranty expired, I doubt I'd buy a Pocket PC with an integrated hard drive for storage.
Taking this estimate under consideration, Nikkei Electronics assumes that the OEM price of "Cornice Personal Storage" is expected to be below US$100. This price is much lower than the 1GB Microdrive, provided by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc of the US, whose OEM price ranges US$170 to US$210. Cornice reduced the number of parts largely to cut price. To reduce the number of parts, it substantially changed HDD's architecture."
Now before you get too excited, it's not removable, and it won't fit in a CompactFlash slot. It's designed to be included inside a device. Once I read that, I wasn't nearly as excited about it. Hard drives will always be more power-hungry than solid state memory (CompactFlash, SD, etc.), and 1 GB really isn't that big if it's the only storage on the device. Granted, this might allow companies to release MP3 players like the iPOD as 1/4 the size, which would be cool, but the impact on the PDA world will likely not be felt unless the power consumption is very, very low.
Even then, having had my 1 GB Microdrive die on me one month after the warranty expired, I doubt I'd buy a Pocket PC with an integrated hard drive for storage.
