1.5GB HDs On a 1" Platter 239
darthv506 was among several to point out a Cnet story describing a new "1.5GB HD on a 1" Platter. Samsung is releasing a sub 600 buck video camera that is "Smaller than a pack of cigarettes" featuring the drive. The drive is actually in production, and apparently goes for $65 in volume.
Radio-TiVo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mike
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:2)
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Another application would be live audio recording. Take your portable radio TiVo thing and add a mic and boom -- live recording of concerts (if you can sneak it in of course
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's one [wnyc.org], here's mine [wuot.org], and here's one more [wbez.org].
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:3, Insightful)
Try listening online while driving or jogging.
People who want Radio-TiVo want all the same conveniences that you get with an ordinary MP3/Ogg player PLUS TIME SHIFTING of Radio Content.
We want something that will automatically record a program - AM/FM, online, whatever - and have the convenience taking that recording with us.
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:2)
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:3, Informative)
When they get to some MP3 or Vorbis streaming, let me know.
WAMU [wamu.org], the Washington D.C. NPR station does MP3 streaming.
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, someone who is taking Ashcroft's advice seriously.
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:3, Informative)
If the show is syndicated and not available online for free, you really should just ante-up and buy tapes to support it don't you think?
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:2)
I guess I would have to say that some of the shows I listen to aren't really paid for all that well just by their syndication fees and need some external support.
I like to accomplish that by sending them a check in exchange for media of some kind (typically books, but I buy the occasional bumper sticker too).
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:3, Interesting)
Triv
Try OZradio... (Score:2)
Looks like OZradio [sourceforge.net] should work and witht he money you save you can get a nice player to listen with.
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.rockstargames.com/vicecity/ [rockstargames.com]
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:3, Informative)
you can record 10,000 hours of minimal-quality audio? Silence takes up just as much space on tape as sound does, not so with decent digital encoding.
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:2, Funny)
ARCHOS does it all and more (Score:2, Informative)
mp3, divx, photos, camera, video shoot & playback, tv recorder & playback, radio, speech/radio/mp3 recorder (some need modules), 3.8 inches screen, USB2/Firewire for a "few" 800 buck.
oh... forgot, it's 20Gb and 40Go in a few months.
Not yet in stores however or already in shortage ?
Re:ARCHOS does it all and more (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah and it weighs a ton. You would not want to have an archos device built into a set of noise cancelling headphones. This drive should be lightweight enough to do that. 20Gb or 40Gb is not that big a deal, I find the critical size threshold is about 1Gb, thats the point at which I can get a decent selection of CDs on the device, enough for a plane trip. It is nice to be able to hold a complete collection of CD
Re:ARCHOS does it all and more (Score:2)
No idea how that would compare to a 1GB flash card, but I figure you might have use for the information.
Re:ARCHOS does it all and more (Score:2)
Or wait a short while until the larger cards get cheaper. 1Gb cards already exist and it is probable that they will be the same price as the 256Mb cards are today in a short while, particularly if the new drive is significant competition.
For a technology like this to have a significant impact it has to be radically better
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:2)
http://www.bargainpda.com/default.asp?newsID=13
It's an app that works like Tivo for the radio.
Re:Radio-TiVo? (Score:2)
How could a radio tivo work?? (Score:2)
Let's hope they learner thier lesson... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully, they've figured out what went wrong there and will be more sucessful this time around...
Though a camera that you can't upgrade storage for (they talk about embedding the HD in products), I'm not so sure about. 1.5GB might be enough for most people, however that comes just as 4 and 5 MP cameras are becoming popular and will probably make 1.5gb seem a bit small!
Re:Let's hope they learner thier lesson... (Score:4, Insightful)
Out now (Score:2)
My real point was that these cameras are all non-upgradable. The only other kind of cameras like that are disposable cameras (actually, this is awesome for the disposable digital cameras). I'm just not sure people want a camera that you can't add "film" to...
Then again, perhaps convenience of the whole thing will win people over.
Re:Out now (Score:2)
Yes, but... (Score:2)
Re:Let's hope they learner thier lesson... (Score:2)
I personally can't wait to get a wristwatch sized mp3 player. MMMmmmmmm...
Re:Yikes! Spell check on isle four... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Ah, but the real question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
While the cards are quite large, and I would consider using fixed storage at around the 1GB mark (that's A LOT of pictures and when I travel, I edit out the crap every night, so I only keep what's good. 200 pictures gets me about 3 weeks to a month of continous vacation somewhere exotic), but here is the problem I see:
When I get a card with 100 pictures on it of places I'll likely neve
Uh oh (Score:4, Funny)
This seems to be great, as long as they're more reliable than Maxtors [slashdot.org].
Longmont Colorado... (Score:4, Interesting)
They started planning early...... (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Surface Mount (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Surface Mount (Score:2, Informative)
weren't these drives announced a while ago? (Score:2, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/15/151
Please use this for an MP3 player (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Please use this for an MP3 player (Score:4, Funny)
Well I do!
Long live P2P!
Re:Please use this for an MP3 player (Score:2)
Re:Please use this for an MP3 player (Score:2)
Re:Please use this for an MP3 player (Score:3, Insightful)
And I do listen to all my music. I have diverse tastes, and it might be a while before I listen to one particular song again, but I do eventually listen to all the music.
Granted my music consuming habits are probably not representative of the general public, but then I think most people use MP3 players
Re:Please use this for an MP3 player (Score:2)
20GB of mp3s is a pittance. A tiny scratch on the average mp3 collection of someone with broadband internet access and a lot of time on their hands and a CD burner.
In Reply to most of the replies (Score:2)
For at home, I can understand having 40 gigs worth of mp3's, but for on the go, it's hardly necessary.
Re:Please use this for an MP3 player (Score:2)
If you want an MP3 player you have to replace if you drop it or if the pocket it is in gets banged against a wall or...
Flash mm cards are now cheap enough for me to be able to carry half a dozen 64mb cards with me, each holding about an album. That's enough for me. The extra space doesn't seem worth going to something mechanical.
Gigs ang gigs.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Serious question: Why don't they go back to 5.25" full height drives with many platters for archival purposes? The speed would likely suck as the heads would need to move a lot from inner to outer edges but the capacity could be huge..
Re:Gigs ang gigs.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd need to create 5 1/4" platters for a *very* small market.
You can change a failed disk in an array much easier than a failed platter inside a hermetically sealed HDD.
Size = IDE (RAID)
Speed = SCSI (RAID)
Really fucking huge? Not sure. Big array? Tape robot? Fibre SCSI?
However, considering you can fit 1TB (4x250gb WD drives) in a desktop now, I don't see that many needing it...
Kjella
Re:Gigs ang gigs.. (Score:2)
I know compaq used that in one of their computers. I can't remember the designation but it was an odd duck, black short desktop with speakers designed for multi-media on board amp but slow cpu and on
Re:Gigs ang gigs.. (Score:2)
It might work. My idea is that you would would have a big brick like this 5.25" HDD in your backpack holding 120 GB or whatnot and then as your camera snaps pictures, they get sent to that drive by bluetooth. This way you can have a tiny and light camera with still a lot
Data Transfer will be the bottleneck (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Data Transfer will be the bottleneck (Score:5, Informative)
USB2.0 or Firewire both have plenty enough bandwidth to saturate the drive. Cornice drives manage well excess of 3MBytes/sec in my experience (I work for Rio), which is faster than I've ever seen from my 1GB microdrive plugged into a PCMCIA-CF adaptor.
Remember USB2.0/Firewire can support up to in excess of 30MBytes/sec. This is faster than a CF interface can manage - CF doesn't have DMA capability.
Hugo
Re:Data Transfer will be the bottleneck (Score:2)
Re:Data Transfer will be the bottleneck (Score:3)
Embedding a hard drive means you can make certain design decisions: Smaller packaging, less connectors, less silicon, certain shapes and configurations, and manufacturing decisions.
The issue is also utility... The idea that Moore's law might make the object in question obsolete by the time you get around to upgrading the capcity, or that if not obsolete, upgrading the capcity makes less sense than getting a new device with new features and new capabilities.
We aren't talking general
Re:Data Transfer will be the bottleneck (Score:2)
I'd say that the fact that the Cornice drives don't use a standard interface is a serious limitation, since it doesn't
Re:Data Transfer will be the bottleneck (Score:2)
Since when is firewire really limiting? Sure it's not as fast as SATA but it's more than fast enough to transfer files or even copy DV video at a rate greater than 1x.
> It can be removed and used as a removable drive by any device with a Compact Flash reader.
Compact Flash is a lot slower than firewire if i'm not mistaken... I could look it up, but I'd just stick with my general
Re:Data Transfer will be the bottleneck (Score:2)
Re:Data Transfer will be the bottleneck (Score:2)
The CF reader I use most is a PCMCIA reader in my laptop. True, most CF readers are USB, so those are a wash as far as speed. Most of my use of CF has been a digital camera, and I much prefer accessing the individual files directly rather than rely on the camera's USB tr
how big? (Score:4, Funny)
That those big giant cigarettes packets like these? [essentialaction.org]
News? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, nevermind. Funny to see that about seven to eigth years ago, everyone thought that HDDs had come to an end and that storage capacity per square centimeters is increasing even faster than Moore's Law.
Probably, HDDs will win over Flash as new IC processing technologies are getting exponentially expensive and HDD more and more power concious.
I should have studied magnetics instead of IC processing.
Re:News? (Score:2)
dont worry you will have your day, there are alarming indications that the magnetic media is coming to an end as a concept, for one IBM sold its hard disk unit [internetnews.com] bet you that they have something big coming, and things like this [itworld.com] (read the last paragraph).
personally I think that in the future you will buy a daily snapshot of the internet stored on a 1"x1"x1" cube instead of surfing, and you will only need a connection only for email and live events.
A video camera seems like an odd fit. (Score:5, Interesting)
A disk with 1.5 GB doesn't compete with DV tapes at all, so it can't be for the video. This is just replacing a flash card in that "cigarette pack"-sized camera to store stills you take along the way? Is this camcorder going to take stills much above 1.5MP? That's what the decent consumer camcorders that take stills are at -- and this one's a $600 camcorder, so it can't be that great. It'd take a looong while to fill 1.5 GB at that resolution.
66 minutes of MPEG 4 video (Score:2)
Re:A video camera seems like an odd fit. (Score:3, Informative)
So, yeah, with 14fps and 1MP each, you're looking at about 3 minutes and 15 seconds of record time, if I didn't drop a zero somewhere. Not too great, is it?
Better laptops (Score:5, Interesting)
Smaller drives should cut energy uptake. With such a drive and a Transmeta, you could have a laptop that keeps going.
Even PDAs will benefit, since some people that are now using microdrives with PCMCIA cards see the battery go down in 2 hours or less.
I would buy a video camera that can save to removeable drives like these after a DivX or XVid encoding, even at a higher pricetag.
Re:Better laptops (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be a good complement to the main hard drive. You could put the OS (along with
Phillip.
Re:Better laptops (Score:2)
And then, they could plop in 4 of these SCSI drives in one laptop. The price will go up but only one drive at a time would be used, still a saving.
Re:Better laptops (Score:2)
Laptop for sale:
Transmeta 800MHz, 256MB SDRAM, 1.5GB Hdd, Debian Linux, CD/DVD player, ATI 3d card, 12hour battery life. $750.
I can see such a product coming soon and taking the markets like a storm. Give or take the Transmeta speed or the OS, such a system is currently in demand by people who have been putting off buying a laptop till now, or the people who have a Pentium2 or less now.
One of these companies one of these days will roll out something like this, others will see success and follow suit. That
$65 for qty. =10k (Score:2)
Re:$65 for qty. =10k (Score:2)
Flash (Score:2)
Compaired to an iPod this is... what? (Score:2)
Re:Compaired to an iPod this is... what? (Score:2)
Think postage stamp sized.
Yay! Super-tiny camcorder! (Score:2, Funny)
I can fit 6 in the bathroom, and she'll never even notice.
Obligatory Linux Comment... (Score:4, Insightful)
But Seriously, Folks, this kind of storage addresses one of the major problems with memory stick-based still cameras: too much $, too few pictures. Say that a camera with this disk only stores 100 or so 10 MByte pictures and then needs a few minutes to D/L them to a bigger box via USB; that STILL compares well with film cameras (36-exposure rolls), and is MUCH more convenient than a CD-R on the back of the camera (seen'em, not impressed, they're bulkier than my SLR and have no interchangeable lenses). And it's inexpensive. Nice engineering job, great toy!
Re:Obligatory Linux Comment... (Score:3, Insightful)
Where these HD's will really be interesting would be in palm pilots, camcorders, and MP3 players.
Re:Obligatory Linux Comment... (Score:2)
It's big enough, but they embedded it according to comments above. You might do better looking for an old 1G IBM CF microdrive.
The news is that they are selling them on their own for under $65. Sure, you can run Linux off of that! I'm hoping to see reasonably priced CF microdrives soon. CF fits my camera, zaurus and laptop and is the next best thing to networking them.
Coincidentally (Score:4, Funny)
Smaller, and cheaper too!
Drive Failures? (Score:3)
Density also will increase, Magenis said. Along with stripping out parts, the company has worked on engineering issues such as keeping energy consumption down. The RCA device will be able to run 12 hours on a single battery charge because the drive's motor shuts down between tasks, Magenis said. Shock-absorbing materials in the drive case will allow devices to sustain the shock from a 1-meter drop, he added.
Won't that be a bit taxing on the motor itself?
1.5GB video camera! Wow! (Score:2)
Oh, but wait, there are idiots plan to use MPEG type compression in-camera because they plan to never edit their footage. I know how we all love to sit through hours of unedited tape! Thrilling!
The New Samsung Camcorder (Score:5, Informative)
Some specs:
smalle! cheaper! better ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they reliable ? For years ?
I'd rather have a big 20Gb@$200 disk that lasts for atleast 7 years,
than a small cheap 200Gb$50 that might do down the drain in half a year.
--
http://osxonintel.xoverzero.com - sign the petition!
Fortunately Hitachi's beat them with a 4GB disk (Score:5, Informative)
The differences between these two products:
But not owning a camcorder I don't know what the usage patterns typically are. I imagine that most days it's used it isn't used for more than an hour throughout the whole day. At this point the MPEG4 encoder may require more power then the HD, which means that a very small li-ion polymer battery will last through the entire drive.
-Adam
Re:Fortunately Hitachi's beat them with a 4GB disk (Score:3, Funny)
Ah... I see you've never been suckered into taping your friends Catholic wedding.
only evolutionary not revolutionary (Score:3, Insightful)
samsung video camera using 1.5 gb hd is less interesting in a sense that they don't have comparable optical and video quality specs and if you take history as a reference, it will be a mediocre camcorder. panasonic is working on pro level camcorder with 6 CF cards, each upto 4 GB. a consumer version of this may be more interesting.
hitachi, which took over ibm microdive, plans to make 4 gb version before the end of the year. if they can make price down, it might succeed.
microdrive had only a partial success in the beginning when CF was very expensive. today, it looks like a solution in need of a problem. for mp3, the 1.8" factor is good enough (e.g. iPod) where you can get upto 30 gb. for cameras, you need lot more reliability that many people are dissatisfied with microdrives. for pda, 512 MB CF is more than enough. for camcorders, tapes provide reliability; dvd based camcorder provides direct archive and micro-dv (Sony) provide compactness. as much as i like the technology, i don't see where to fit it.
Wow! That's... not big enough (Score:4, Insightful)
But that said, it does seem likely the capacity of these little suckers will go up, way faster than Flash, so it'll be worth it soon. But 1.5GB? It's too late to be impressive, kinda like... Don't make me say it.... Zip GIZZMO DRIVE! Remember when those seemed big?
Already a standard: The chinese are on it too (Score:2)
A preceeding article [nikkeibp.com] mentions the 2.4 Gb Magicstor already in production with 3.6 Gb on target this year and 4.7 next year. The same article predicts that 0.7 inches will be the next big standard if some barriers are passed.
If Cornice or some other company bought Ritek's Microstor [dpreview.com] is unkown to me (it seems to have been related to dataplay developers too) but it's clear that there is a shortage of good brand names for this product. The Press release for Magicstor was hilarious, promptly stating that the
Oh you knew this was coming, but RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ahem... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ahem... (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, the IBM/Hitachi Microdrive is a hard drive, not a flash drive. It just happens to be the same size (about one inch) and have the same interface as a Compact Flash type 2 card.
Being a mechanical device, the Microdrive draws more power and is more fragile than a flash card. Its main attraction used to be high capacity, but Compact Flash is rapidly catching up.
There's a 4 GB version of the Microdrive coming this fall, says Steve's Digicams [steves-digicams.com]
Re:ahem... (Score:3, Insightful)
But on fragility, they are not as bad as people would think. Sure, they aren't the oops-I-ran-the-flash-through-the-laundry indestructible, but if you read the actual specs on how much shock it can take before causing
Re:ahem... (Score:2)
Re:ahem... (Score:5, Funny)
-n
Re:What about memory? (Score:4, Funny)
Because it's cool goddamnit!
Re:Whatever happened to (Score:2, Informative)
Give it a few years (yeah, yeah, I know you've already been waiting) You're more likely to see these as the transition to optical computing takes place in , well, a couple of decades.
Re:Whatever happened to (Score:2, Informative)
"Scientists in the lab discovered a way to manipulate the crystal's structure with lasers and store data three-dimensionally in holograms within the crystal's volume. The greatest benefit of holographic storage is that huge amounts of data locked in the crystal matrix can be accessed instantaneously. The iron-doped lithium niobate crystals are grayish in color and the size of Las Vegas dice. Although still in the experimental stage, t
Re:Smaller than a pack of cigarettes? (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, that's a good idea. In this day and age, no one would notice you pulling out a pack of smokes.
And then, after the crowd has finished with their nasty looks and *gagging* sounds, and the manager has told you there's no smoking within 16 miles of the place, and the bouncer has asked you to leave, and everyone stops looking directly at you, you can be sneaky.