Tuesday, December 9, 2003
Tiny Hard Drives Offer Big Storage
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 08:00 AM
"The growing demand for low-cost, high-capacity, and compact storage for mobile devices is pushing development of small form-factor hard drives and the first of a new generation of sub-1-inch drives should hit the market in 2004. One of the first companies to show a sub-1-inch hard drive is expected to be Japan's Toshiba. The company plans to show a sample drive product at the CES show that takes place in Las Vegas in January 2004, it said Monday.
Toshiba wouldn't provide any further details about the drive although industry sources say that Toshiba and several other companies, including Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics Industries, are working on development of drives with 0.8-inch or 0.7-inch diameter platters. That's smaller than the CompactFlash form-factor Microdrive produced by Hitachi, which is based on a 1-inch platter, and less than half the size of the 1.8-inch drive used in Apple Computer's IPod portable music player..."
I'm generally pessimistic about the idea of putting a moving hard drive in a Pocket PC (likely because I had an IBM Microdrive fail on me), but there seems to be a lot of positive momentum moving in the direction of integrating mass storage in portable devices. I wasn't a big believer in this until I saw the Rio Nitrus player, which has a 1.5 GB hard drive in it - and you have to assume Rio wouldn't release a portable MP3 player unless they knew it was fairly sturdy. So, who knows - we might see a Pocket PC with integrated hard disk-based storage on it in the near future...
Toshiba wouldn't provide any further details about the drive although industry sources say that Toshiba and several other companies, including Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics Industries, are working on development of drives with 0.8-inch or 0.7-inch diameter platters. That's smaller than the CompactFlash form-factor Microdrive produced by Hitachi, which is based on a 1-inch platter, and less than half the size of the 1.8-inch drive used in Apple Computer's IPod portable music player..."
I'm generally pessimistic about the idea of putting a moving hard drive in a Pocket PC (likely because I had an IBM Microdrive fail on me), but there seems to be a lot of positive momentum moving in the direction of integrating mass storage in portable devices. I wasn't a big believer in this until I saw the Rio Nitrus player, which has a 1.5 GB hard drive in it - and you have to assume Rio wouldn't release a portable MP3 player unless they knew it was fairly sturdy. So, who knows - we might see a Pocket PC with integrated hard disk-based storage on it in the near future...
