One After the Other: Western Digital Enter the Mini-Drive Market

[Darius Wey]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.westerndigital.com/en/company/releases/PressRelease.asp?release={0CB405C1-FBB0-447C-9647-38195009ED0F}' target='_blank'>http://www.westerndigital.com/en/co...7-38195009ED0F}</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Serving a rapidly expanding base of customers for mass storage, Western Digital Corp. announced today that the company will enter the market for miniature hard drives with a family of 1-inch drives that enable a variety of handheld consumer devices, which are experiencing explosive demand."</i><br /><br />First Hitachi, Seagate and Toshiba, now Western Digital have decided to enter the mini-drive market. Western Digital's 1-inch hard drives will run at 3,600RPM at capacities of up to 6GB, and feature a CompactFlash Type II interface and form factor. Western Digital are also priding themselves on their anti-skip technology and power-saving technologies, which should make this a major force in the mini-drive market.

[ctmagnus]

imo, 3600RPM doesn't sound very fast to me. That's half as fast as the average desktop harddrive being bought today. Granted, these drives are designed for a different purpose and form factor, but still...

[Jonathan1]

imo, 3600RPM doesn't sound very fast to me. That's half as fast as the average desktop harddrive being bought today. Granted, these drives are designed for a different purpose and form factor, but still...

Keep in mind that we are also talking about a much smaller platter. A 3600 RPM drive on a 1” in diameter platter is going to be a heck of a lot faster then a 3600 RPM drive on a 3” diameter platter.

[Shadowcat]

Even laptop hard drives only start at 4200 RPM and max out at 7200 RPM as far as I know.

[riuster]

right now the hitachi provides a 3600rpm micro drive at 12 mbps transfer rate, the lowest CF cards provide a 4mbps transfer rate or even up to 10mbps..but its about 100 bucks per gig...so if the Western is at 12mbps at a cheaper 1gb/$ for a 6gig..and with a little fingernail notch...it looks good to me.

[Jason Dunn]

Western Digital makes GREAT hard drives, so this is a great thing to see.

[juttonn]

imo, 3600RPM doesn't sound very fast to me. That's half as fast as the average desktop harddrive being bought today. Granted, these drives are designed for a different purpose and form factor, but still...

Keep in mind that we are also talking about a much smaller platter. A 3600 RPM drive on a 1” in diameter platter is going to be a heck of a lot faster then a 3600 RPM drive on a 3” diameter platter.

Um, unless I've misunderstood what you're trying to say, I think you have it backwards. If a 1" platter spins at 3600 RPM, then it is moving at 11,304 inches per minute at the rim (I'm not going to try to convert that into mph right now). A 3" platter spinning at 3600 RPM moves at 33,912 inches per minute (3 times as fast). Of course those speeds get slower as you move towards the center of the platter. That is why CD burners burn at higher rates near the eadge of the CD than near the center.

I had a 2.2 GB microdrive card for a while and sold it to my brother-in-law for his camera and bought a 2 gb CF card instead. While I think that the 1" Hard Drives are great solutions for storing media (audio/video), GPS maps, or other large files that you can slip into a Pocket PC to use when you need to, I don't think that it is a good way to go if you want to leave the card in your Pocket PC all the time, like I did. When I would turn on my PPC, I'd have to wait as long as 15 seconds while the disk spun up before I could do anything on my PPC, whether I was using data on the CF card or not. Maybe I needed to defragment the drive, but that took a while to get done. I've never had that problem with a CF card. The thing they do have going for them though is the lower Gigabyte to Dollar price, so that's why I think they are perfect for storing movies and GPS maps and the like and just popping it in when you need it.

[prototype]

I think the comment about the platter size was not necessarily about speed of the spin, but about the distance that the head has to traverse across the platter to find the data.