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.
Comments on World's Smallest Hard Drive
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2 Posted by xslipperyx on Thu Sep 3, 2009 10:53PM EDT Report Abuse
Is there any advantage of having a mini HD over flash memory? I thought the trend was towards the flash type? Just curious...
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3 Posted by sbalourdos on Thu Sep 3, 2009 9:06PM EDT Report Abuse
You're right, Slippery! I guess Toshiba engineers have too much time on their hands. Pallete drives are dead! Long live FLASH!!!
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4 Posted by nategesner on Thu Sep 3, 2009 7:34PM EDT Report Abuse
Yaaaawn! Yeh, it's small. But so are the 16GB thumb drives available on the market right now (under $400). This tiny drive would be too fragile to put in a phone that's tossed into a backpack or a back pocket and probably costs twice as much as to manufacture as flash memory. Everything is going portable, which requires fewer moving parts and protection from shock, which makes a hard disk drive impractical. They should stick to improving flash memory.
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5 Posted by womanphoenix on Thu Sep 3, 2009 10:49PM EDT Report Abuse
Get a couple of those babies, some baby RAM chips, and you could actually run XP software on a device the size of a BlackBerry.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
1 Posted by ripdat on Thu Sep 3, 2009 8:42PM EDT Report Abuse
it looks like a miniature turn table. -sorry i'm not smarter and couldn't offer any brilliant insight.