World's Smallest Hard Drive

Mon Jan 8, 2007 11:23AM EST

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What's this? Not a Chiclet but an 8GB hard drive! Toshiba showed off its tiny, 0.85-inch hard drive last night, which is so small that it may have to be slapped with a "choking hazard" warning. It actually has a Guinness Book of World Records entry and weighs all of 2 grams. The drive has just jumped from 4GB to 8GB...can 16GB be far behind?

At its storage booth, Toshiba also showed off external storage hard drives (the first it's ever released), plus the first-ever writeable HD-DVD drives, in form factors for both desktop PCs and laptops. I didn't photograph those because, well, they look exactly like regular computer components.

I'll try to review some of these products in the coming months.

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  • 6 Posted by nategesner on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:34PM EDT Report Abuse

    My comments aren't showing, so it looks like I'm late already! This is a boring news story. 16GB flash drives are on the market for under $400. What's the point of a hard drive this size? It's impractical for portable devices because it has moving parts and it's probably more expensive to manufacture than flash memory. They should stop wasting their time and stick to what's good for portable devices, which is the way of the future.

  • 7 Posted by prometheus_fx4 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 8:20PM EDT Report Abuse

    While Mini-HD is an interesting concept, I still believe that Flash memory is the way of the future. No moving parts to fail. No heat generated by moving parts. Can you imagine boot times and access times for a Pc running a RAMDrive? If you have $5000 or so to shell out on whatever you want, there IS such thing NOW. It was advertised and reviewed in PC Mag about a year or so ago.

  • 8 Posted by gvhansen on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:14PM EDT Report Abuse

    I see that #3 post sure has a limited I.Q. to do a comparison to the Democrats also is very immature. However, they have missed the real advantage of the tiny hard drive. First off Thumb drives are slow in data transfer rates compare to hard drives. Secondly I can see the advantages of these drives for things like Camcorders were images need to be captured at very fast speed and at large bites of data, especially for high definition or quality images, video games systems like Nintendo DS and other applications.

  • 9 Posted by mountainman31us on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:26PM EDT Report Abuse

    Well, what about the new "phase" memory that's being tinkered with? Also, wasn't there supposed to be a couple laptops using Flash memory, instead of DDR? Think the nickname for them was "Flashtops".

  • 10 Posted by mikero123 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:20PM EDT Report Abuse

    Impressive accoplishment. I remember a lot of things that had no apparent value until the idea evolved. Maybe this is the beginning of something very useful. At the moment it does not seem to compete with FLASH memory in size and cost.

  • 11 Posted by carjava on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:18PM EDT Report Abuse

    The guy commenting about democrats brain...I think you said it right, it might be limited but realistic and practical and guess what it works. The republican brain is so big an inflated that its hollow and filled with huge ego. My quote "No wonder the world is all about see what I can do instead what we can do."

  • 12 Posted by frank_wwww on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:03PM EDT Report Abuse

    To all you people advocating flash drives, I am amazed that you are so much smarter than the folks at Toshiba, who are after all are smart people and in the storage business. I suggest that you see if you can find a miniature processor to augment your single brain cell.

  • 13 Posted by liornie on Thu Sep 3, 2009 6:53PM EDT Report Abuse

    Hmmmm 3 and 9 this is not a place for political bickering..lol...im just curious as to what type of hard drives are inside ipods? im sure they are also very small and @ 30G and 60G, so whats the big deal with this 8G HD? and one more thing number 9...its bytes not bites.

  • 14 Posted by rabbyph on Thu Sep 3, 2009 8:25PM EDT Report Abuse

    I hope they make a Thumb/Tiny/Mini Desktop PC! Smaller than Shuttle PC's

  • 15 Posted by mrshanahan on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:28PM EDT Report Abuse

    As far as corrections go, 15, learn to use our friend the apostrophe. "I'm." "It's." (As in, "it is bytes, not bites")

  • 16 Posted by brokenspoketexan on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:13PM EDT Report Abuse

    Maybe they can make a miniture keyboard to go with the useless miniture hard disk drive! I can't imagine how small the screen and mouse would be... for the love...

  • 17 Posted by chris_in_mainz on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:25PM EDT Report Abuse

    Does this drive have any advantage over a 8gb SD card which would be cheaper, smaller and more durable?

  • 18 Posted by julfeng on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:44PM EDT Report Abuse

    Ha, Democrats brain is an accurate analogy because it seems like a good idea, is small, it lacks substance, costs a lot of money and the end result is failure. Now, if we could just force everyone to get it by passing a law.

  • 19 Posted by lowiqprez on Thu Sep 3, 2009 6:58PM EDT Report Abuse

    20 years ago if you told someone that they had the "Smallest" harddrive they would have beat you up, now people brag about having the smallest harddrive. LOL

  • 20 Posted by jay_penguin150 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 4:29PM EDT Report Abuse

    Imagine what will happen when Apple gets this for the shuffle. It's the same size, but only 1gb. Imagine a 8gb shuffle! Or a 640gb video.

  • 21 Posted by cm2gj on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:27PM EDT Report Abuse

    The hard drive is fastest than the flash card. The flash card have limited time use (10,000 writes, 20,000 reads). The hard drive have increased transfer speed and buffer advantages. The hard drive don't have a Table of contents limiter (you cannot save more than 1 millions files in a flash). The hard drive don't support the security and compression like a hard drive (see xp encrypt and compression in xp), you cannot format a flash drive as NTFS in order to support advanced permissions and auditing!. The hard drive is better for video and audio editing, is better for large buffer transfers like camcorders, storage devices and hybrid systems. regards

  • 23 Posted by magx64 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:03PM EDT Report Abuse

    Of course it's a white elephant and flash is the way to go, that's why it's made by Toshiba and not Sony.

  • 24 Posted by neandrithal1 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:35PM EDT Report Abuse

    who cares about politics. lets get to the real subject... its technology. its small. its freaking COOL! good job toshiba, now make it smaller with bigger capacity, and a lot cheaper.

  • 25 Posted by nickb_92 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:37PM EDT Report Abuse

    they need those in mp3 players, they would be very light

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