12 GB 1-Inch HD!

[Jon Westfall]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.betanews.com/article/Seagate_Unveils_12GB_1Inch_Hard_Drive/1139859347' target='_blank'>http://www.betanews.com/article/Sea...rive/1139859347</a><br /><br /></div><i>"As consumer devices such as phones and MP3 players continually shrink, storage has remained a persistent drawback that limits their usefulness. Seagate thinks it may have found the answer thanks to perpendicular recording technology. The disk maker on Monday unveiled a 12-gigabyte drive squeezed into a 1-inch form factor... Seagate is targeting the drive at the mobile phone market...The ST1.3 is expected to begin shipping in the third quarter of 2006."</i><br /><br />These things keep getting smaller, don't they? Coming soon will be this comfortably sized HD with a super small form factor. I believe the day is coming (sooner than I thought) that I can put all of my music collection on storage media no bigger than my stylus!

[Muntasser]

i think personally that perpendicular recording is the boundary of magnetic HDD technology today.

So i cant agree with the music collection on a stylus comment, but it is very encouraging to see 12gigs in the 1" factor.

Heres to the future 0X

[brianworkman]

Forget a stylus, I just want to be able to store it on my I730. The sooner this happens, the sooner there will be true iPod killers in the market. I feel like this is the only drawback that a PPC has to an iPod, media storage.

[IpaqMan2]

I am waiting for the day when any OEM vendor will release a Windows mobile device with 4+ Gigs of internal memory. If an ipod Nano can pack a gig of flash storage and we now have miniture harddrives with 4 and more gigs of storage, there's no reason why we can't have Pocket PC device that has the same now.

And don't ask what would anyone want to do with that much storage. If you have to ask, than you simply aren't a power user. That's like the Palm crowd asking some 4 or 5 years ago, Why would anyone need a color Palm or a Palm that plays Mp3s.

[brianworkman]

And don't ask what would anyone want to do with that much storage. If you have to ask, than you simply aren't a power user.

AMEN!


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[geneb]

I don't care how much storage they squeeze into a small space for a hard drive. It's still a hard drive.

Will your phone still work, after you drop it, if it uses a hard drive for memory?

I agree with IpaqMan2, we should be seeing PPC's with 4+ Gig of internal memory. That would be much more reliable than a hard drive, and based on the cost we are seeing for ipods it should not raise the price of the device much, if any!

[Kacey Green]

I don't care how much storage they squeeze into a small space for a hard drive. It's still a hard drive. Will your phone still work, after you drop it, if it uses a hard drive for memory?

combine this new drive with the "airbag" technology that parks the head before a freefall or other traumatic experiance, then combine this with the new hybrid hard drive technology from Windows Vista and you have a great combination for a high speed, high capacity, durable hard drive.

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[seaflipper]

combine this new drive with the "airbag" technology that parks the head before a freefall or other traumatic experiance, then combine this with the new hybrid hard drive technology from Windows Vista and you have a great combination for a high speed, high capacity, durable hard drive.

Doesn't matter how much "airbag" technology it uses, the thing still has moving parts. NAND Flash is the way to go IMO. Micron has 16gb NAND Flash chips on the way

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[tanalasta]

For sheer datasize - HDD have the advantage over flash chips. They're cheaper and store much more data - but as people have mentioned, are much less reliable and fragile.

Most pda's come with both SD/CF slots - if you want to be able to store Gb's of data - then purchase a microdrive. But personally, I'm against HDD's in pda's as default. They use more power, are prone to corruption and to be honest, who hasn't dropped their pda at least a couple of times! There probably was a good reason why Apple changed to flash storage for their iPod nano.

At least when my SD card falls out of my device after a hard drop I slot it back in and it's all fine and dandy again! :twisted:

[Jason Dunn]

While Flash memory is certainly more ideal from a power/durability perspective, I think the fears about hard drive failure are largely overrated - look at how many millions of iPods are out there, and I certainly haven't heard about any widespread problems with hard drive failure in them. I've had a couple of hard drive-based audio players and have dropped them, yet they keep working. Mobile drives are more durable than you think, and will always offer more storage for the money.

[Constant Caffeine]

They should take the hard drive and build a PDA around it.

What a lovely idea: 12GB internally in your PDA! :drool:

[Ed@Brighthand]

Mobile drives are more durable than you think, and will always offer more storage for the money.

Hear, hear.

Seagate says that this drive can survive a 1.5 meter fall onto concrete. If that happened to your typical handheld, it's quite likely you'd be looking for a new screen, enclosure, and who knows what else.

And this comes from a guy who has dropped a very nice Axim onto a hardwood floor and shattered its LCD.

It seems microdrives are roughly as durable as most of the rest of the components of a typical handheld.

These are delicate devices, but microdrives are no more so than many other components.