1GB of optical storage?

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=70&e=3&cid=70&u=/cn/20020620/tc_cn/937621">http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=70&e=3&cid=70&u=/cn/20020620/tc_cn/937621</a><br /><br />"Consumer-electronics giant 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. The drive uses 3cm discs that can store up to 1GB of data. Typical CDs, measuring 12cm in diameter, can hold up to 650MB of data. The prototype drive measures just 5.6 by 3.4 by 0.75cm--suitable for use in portable devices such as digital cameras, handhelds and cell phones--but the company is continuing to work to shrink the drive."<br /><br />Moving parts, so the battery life won't be great, but it is cheaper than flash memory. I suspect too that 1GB is just the beginning. If they hit their 27GB targets for standard CD-sized disks, this should get 3-4GB before they are done. Given it will only have one "platter" it should fit in a CF-I slot. Perhaps even an SD slot with a protrusion for the drive. This will pretty much put an end to DataPlay's 500MB drives that still haven't really seen the light of day.

[Jason Dunn]

This product will be as dead in the water as DataPlay for mobile devices - spinning parts simply don't belong in PDAs, phones, MP3 players, etc. There may be a small market for them in discman-type devices, and the storage would be nice, but the drive assemblies they need to spin a disk are too big and take too much power.

[mookie123]

Even if they make it work, by the time it reaches the market a year or two from now, 500Mb SD/ 1G SD would be dirt cheap and everywhere. They also will have a hard time convincing OEM to add expensive mechanical driver to PDA (or any other consumer electronic).

I read it somewhere that in order for a new technology to supplement current one it has to be at least 100-1000 times better (LP,Casette,CD), otherwise consumer won't accept the hassle of changing standard. This technology doesn't offer that much improvement over solid state tech.

[Mark (NL)]

This article was posted in the local paper here too (living quite near Philips Research) It also stated that we wouldn't have to expect any consumer devices that use this functionality until 2005. This due to the developement of "blue laser technology" (normally they use "red laser technology for optical storage devices) that is needed to being able to get the higher storage. Also in the article there was a quite nice explenation that they just minimized all components that are in a "normal" cd player, except for the lens for the laser... the lens being normally something like 1 mm cant get much smaller but they could change the shape by using optical plastics, instead of glass...

Quite nice technology if you ask me :-)

[captgoodhope]

Did anyone ever determine why we can't get 5-10 GB in a pda now like the ipod has?

[Ed Hansberry]

Did anyone ever determine why we can't get 5-10 GB in a pda now like the ipod has?
The side of the hard drive for one.

[Jason Dunn]

Did anyone ever determine why we can't get 5-10 GB in a pda now like the ipod has?

The battery life on a Pocket PC with a hard drive would be atrocious - the iPOD is able to get decent battery life by not having a colour screen, very low res, wussy CPU (the DSP probably does all the audio playback)...

That said, you can go out and buy a 5 gig Toshiba PCMCIA hard drive today and use it.