What's that I hear?
That sucking sound??
OH!!!!!
That's the sound of your battery withering away to 15 minutes.
It would be nice, butttt.....
First, yes I know these are April fools topics, but this one is actually very thought provoking.
Actually increasing the capacity of a drive doesn't increase it's power requirements. In fact, Increasing the density of the drive may decrease power requirements, provided an optimized data layout, as the drive head tends to travel less due to a smaller area.
<idea>
What's really needed in the portable hard drives(Micro, 1.8", 2.5") arena are technologies to spin the drive down to lower RPMs when idle. When the user queues up requests the drive would spin up to higher speeds. In this way, you could implement a 2.5" laptop drive that peeked at 7200 rpm, but idled at say 3800rpm.
</idea>
<analysis>
The exponential growth (literally) capacity in flash RAM and miniature introduces a serious question on the viability of Micro-Drive for the future. Flash RAM is lower power, solid-state, faster and more convenient.
A couple years ago, MicroDrive filled a critical market niche as Flash RAM was STILL very expensive in higher densities. Now 256MB CF (CF is the Bellweather of flash memory) cards are under $100, 512MB is typically under $200. 1GB flash cards are available at the $250 level.
1GB Microdrives are as low as $190 on Pricewatch.com. 512MB Micro is as low as $130.
Obviously, both technologies have come down dramatically in price. However, it's obvious that flash is making tremendous gains not matched by Microdrive. Add in the additional problems associated with power consumption and potential failure and Microdrive may seem headed for extinction.
If microdrive is to remain competitive, I believe that they must ramp their capacities up well above that of Flash RAM. A 10GB drive is just what is needed. Such a device would be perfect for an extra-small form factor MP3 player (Toshiba and Apple and Creative currently use the 1.8" (PC-Card) form factor drives).
The micro-drive could become the storage center for ultra-high capacity portable media machines featuring video as well as picture and audio. A 6.7GB capacity COULD become a way to deliver rented DVD movies to new tablet PCs which increasingly feature CF slots in lieu of PC-card slots to save space. *Though it looks like the Blue-Ray crowd are looking to deliver micro-sized DVDs IN jackets (unlike traditional DVDs).
In any case, something has to give. Microdrive will lose it's viability if it's only "one step" ahead of Flash in price and capacity.
</analysis>