Philips Blue Laser Itty Bitty Disc Drive

Acid-F1ux writes "Over at news.com they are running a story about how Philips is demonstrating a prototype miniature disc drive that uses a coin-size disc capable of storing nearly twice as much data as a standard-sized CD. "

Speed?

[proj_2501]

The article didn't say anything about how fast the drive is. Any more info?

and another one bites ...

[hummer357]

this is probably like all those other "new standards" ...

anyone remember the data minidisk ? dataplay ? dvd+r ? countless others?

let's hope this one gets cheap, medium fast, and marketed *very* quickly.

yeah right...

coin sized?

[phyr]

why must new techology always like to be smaller. Instead of fitting twice as much on a coin sized cd why not fit a lot more Gb on a regular sized CD?

Eh...

[Paradoxish]

The technology is pretty damn cool, but it's like every other bit of cool technology we hear about - more than likely it'll take years before it's in wide-spread use. In this case, I don't really see the point though. A DVD can hold much more information and because of that my DVD drive is good for playing discs that contain movies, lots of media, games, regular CDs, whatever. There's no reason to add another (smaller) data storage format to the PC... ...and in the case of other consumer-level products that might use this: what's the point? The main use for CDs right now is to hold audio, but the vast majority of artists can't even fill a CD with music. So, really, what's the point? (by the way, I AM aware that the technology is cool, I just think that making a tiny disc that doesn't offer any real storage advantage was a poor choice to make use of it)

I just wanna do backups!

[DNAGuy]

Can somebody please just come up with a convenient, inexpensive storage medium that allows me to back up these giant (~100GB) hard drives. I haven't had a decent backup medium in years and the commercial stuff is far too expensive for the average consumer.

How do you label them?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a hard enough time fitting a listing of the contents on regular sized CDs. Will these new coin sized CDs come with a match sized marker and a magnifying glass?

-Sorry about the anon posting

Microdrive killer?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

If there things cost less than $20, they'd totally wipe out the microdrive niche for high-end cameras - who cares if each picture takes 20MB when i've got 5 of these in my pocket.

Form factor

[fruey]

I have seen a lot of people talking about losing these mini blu-ray CDs and all that, but what they are really for is for PDAs and cameras. The 5" form factor of current optical discs (CD and DVD) is perfect. Much smaller and they would be a lot harder to handle. Remember CD singles on 3" discs? They stopped that pretty fast and went back to 5" discs with 3" of nothing. Wish I still had some of my CD-singles though, bet they'll be worth a bit soon.

The credit card form factor is better for rescue CDs, in your wallet for those times when the server won't boot at a client's place. These are just for PDAs and cameras and maybe walkman jukeboxes, once they are burnable for cheap of course.

It would seem that a lot of you missed the point that the form factor is just "cool" so they're mentioning it, but of course this will scale up to high capacity optical 5" discs, each fitting the contents of the British Library AND the library of congress...

Or how about using these discs inside old 3.5" disc cases? That would make them easy to handle and should they be RW it would be a bonus.

Minidisc?

[Christianfreak]

This looks pretty cool but one has to wonder if it will make it or if it will go the way of the minidisc [minidisc.com]. I guess the market will decide, but right now CD's are pretty entrenched (even with the MP3 players that are out now).

Re:Top worries about small drives

[Lord_Slepnir]

Ever have a problem when you're lying naked on your money, and you accidently get a dime stuck in the crack of your ass? This is much worse.

If you have a problem with that, then the dime (or CD) is the least of your problems.

Re:This will be another ZIP/LS-120 drive -- NOT!

[scharkalvin]

Oh size DOES matter. You can't fit a 5.25" disk in a digicam, and the 3.5" disks make for a bulky mess (Sony's CD digicam is a little to big to fit in your pocket). With a coin size disk they will work nicely in the average pocket size digicam. I think the disk will have to be enclosed in a little plastic case (about the size of a compact flash or smart media card) or they will get lost in your pocket and damaged.

Re:You can never have enough disk space

[Dark Paladin]

Solomon's Law (from Dwight Solomon, a very wise man I used to work with): Storage capacity will always expand to fill storage availability, plus 10%.

Re:Cool to see Philips designing some new standard

[Andy Dodd]

Note: Philips is concerned with protecting their money.

But what's good for the consumer is good for Phillips . Happens to bad for the RIAA, but Phillips obviously doesn't care too much for them, because the RIAA's pushes at DRM, etc. hurt sales of Phillips products.

Moving parts

[sacremon]

Great. Just what I need in something portable like a camera is another moving part. The nice thing about flash memory is that is doesn't have any moving parts = fewer things that will wear out or have to made shock resistant.

Re:Moving parts

[Noofus]

Worse than shock resistance is the fact that moving parts require alot of power. Entierly solid state devices dont need much power due to the fact that the solid state devices are rather efficient. Motors and servos and anything else that moves are dreadfully inefficient.

Moving parts = large bulky batteries etc, meaning added weight and less use per charge/per battery.

What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Blu-Ray technology is cool, but I don't see the point of this 3cm device. IBM has had their 1GB CompactFlash drive out for a couple years now. They can feasibly increase its capacity to 6GB. Toshiba has a PC Card (typeII) drive that's got at least 5GB and they may go to 20GB.

Introducing a new proprietary format for storage is stupid, unless it really breaks some new ground. I am not impressed with 1GB on a 3cm disc.

27GB on a CD is great. If they stick to the CD format costs will be kept down and hopefully CDRW read/write speeds will keep increasing. Maybe we will be able to use them as our main storage.

Re:Form factor

[virtual_mps]

Are you kidding? I love the 3" cd format--I've got a spindle of 50 3" cdr's on my desk right now. The music industry probably stopped using it because it's more theft-prone than the 5" format. (Small enough to fit in a pocket, smaller than the usual anti-theft boxes will hold)--but the fact that it fits in a pocket is a huge advantage for me. The jewel cases for these are *exactly* the same size as a 3.5" floppy, so you can get some more life out of your old floppy stroage bins...

Re:Wrong! DVD's aren't as big

[LetterJ]

but a tiny one that can hold 1gb isn't very interesting.

It is if you're using a 6+ megapixel digital camera [adoramaphoto.com] and each RAW shot takes up 7.5MB. The only way the D60 gets to 1GB today is through a microdrive.

I think you guys are partly missing the point...

[fireflew]

The main market for these "coin sized disks" will not be to replace the CD but to be used in places where previously the only storage options were solid state. Think about having 1GB of data storage in your cell phone for example, no more limits on the number of contacts or amount of programs. Also think of the PDA market, now you can port real program over to these things since you will have the space to run them from. Of course all this assumes that these disks will run at decent speeds and not to very movement sensitive. Don't just think of these as a replacement for the standard CD, think of theese as a replacement for those damn flash RAM cards.