Toshiba's Tiny Hard Disks Start Shipping

[Jonathon Watkins]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mobilepipeline.com/57300019' target='_blank'>http://www.mobilepipeline.com/57300019</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Toshiba said Thursday that it is about to start shipping its .85-inch, 2GB hard drive aimed at use in smartphones and other mobile devices. In addition, the company said it will start shipping a 4 GB version of the drive about the middle of the year with capacities increasing to as much as 8 GB in 2006. . . . Besides smartphones, the company said it expected the drives to be attractive for use in devices such as PDAs, digital cameras and media players. "</i><br /><br />There have been a flurry of tiny hard disk announcements recently and this looks to be an area where we can expect significant future developments. The Toshiba hard drive weighs less than three grams, so it's light as well as being minute. Well these drives are shipping now, so lets see when the first Pocket PC with embedded hard drive arrives. I wonder how they will co-marketing them; as MP3 players, Photo viewers or video players. What would you do with the space if your next PPC happens to have a hard drive?

[foebea]

Fill it up with large games, like gilbert goodmate, and indy and the fate of atlantis, sam&amp;max, etc. Add in movies, tv, music, funny video clips, photos from the digital camera.

I can fill 250 gb in no time, I'm ready for anything toshiba can throw at me :)

I have the 5gb drive currently from the Rio Carbon and I find that very limiting in terms of what i can store. For example I could have over a dozen movies, and a few hours of tv, or like 35 hours of tv and a movie and some mp3s, or about a 1000 mp3s, but not everything at once. also wikipedia takes 1.5 gigs, so I look forward to an affordable 8 gb drive.
:mrgreen:

[marcm]

Me, I'd use it for videos (airplane flights are now shortened :wink:), and LOTS of games, including some PSX ISOs from my game collection to use with FpseCE!!! :D

[webdaemon]

MP3's, Movies, TV shows, ebooks and probably games.

[DuaneAA]

I am not clear why you would want an embedded harddrive. I have a 4 GB microdrive in the CF slot in my pocketPC. I can pull it out and stick it into a USB 2.0 card reader and large video files transfer much, much faster than using the docking station. Unless they make some software changes, I would prefer to stick to a removable drive.

I like to watch movies and TV shows while I work out at the gym. Currently I just finished episode 5 of 'Tru Calling'.

Duane

[beq]

Assuming a normal CF formfactor slot on the top would take up too much extra space compared to an .85" embedded HDD, someone in a previous thread suggested making a socket (perhaps with ZIF connector?) on the back similar to how removable batteries are inserted. Perhaps this HDD card socket can be directly under the battery...

[Stephen Beesley]

Movies, movies and more movies - great for filling in time on the commute to work.

[limit]

PIctures, mp3s and movies, I have a 1GB SD but right now I need to resize my files, its filling up so fast

[amnon]

The big game here is about pricing.

Here's an example:
SanDisk 2GB Ultra-II SD card for 200$:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&amp;category=50525&amp;item=3862499201&amp;rd=1

Will the 2GB hard drive cost less? If not, I don't think there is any reason for it to exist. If it will cost around 50$, now we have something to talk about (but I doubt it).

I prefer no moving parts memory any day.

Want to embed memory? then embed 2GB or 1GB of SD-like memory. Without the SD contacts and case it will take very very little space (less than that .85" hard drive).

[frankenbike]

A full gig for complete maps of North America (well, north of the Mexican border, anyway), 900 megs for MP3s, and the last 100 megs for software.

And then I'd have a free SD (or CF or both) slot for IO.

[Len M.]

What would we (and our customers) do with 2 or 4 or 8 GB of internal hard drive space?

Well, since we record high resolution audio, it depends on how fast the hard drive is.

Today, the Hitachi/IBM 4 GB CF Microdrive won't record at 24-bit/96 KS/s -- it's limited to recording at 24/48, so we don't recommend those drives. The write rate limit is in the hard drive, not the CF card interface, so mounting it internally won't make it any faster.

We need continuous write rates of around 1.2 MByte/sec. Give us an internal 8 GB hard drive that can support those write rates and we won't need a slot for memory cards (though we'll still need a CF card slot for our PDAudio-CF S/PDIF digital audio interface).


Len Moskowitz
Core Sound
www.core-sound.com
Home of PDAudio

[Jonathon Watkins]

Personally I'd use a largeish HD for MP3s, photos, the odd video and as a backup device. I also plan to get a GPS device at some point, so some maps would be nice too. Oh, and Wipedia as well etc. In fact, I want to carry it ALL around with me! :lol: