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Forbes: Dinky Drives To Drive New Devices
by , 11:00 AM EDT, May 27th, 2004
With a small hard drive, and a little imagination, the folks at Apple came up with the iPod, creating a massive consumer market segment in the process. As the makers of the tiny drives struggle to keep up with current demand, others are looking at what Apple has done and are trying to see how the small drives can be used in other devices as well. The challenge, according to a Forbes article, is to make the drives cheap enough to keep the device it ends up in within the means of a majority of consumers, and that's not easy. From the Forbes article:
There are a lot of lessons still being learned from devices like Apple Computer's iPod music player, and not all of them have to do with how the music business is changing.
These lessons include what else is changing the consumer electronics business in general, and how that industry now has to look at data storage. One important trend that bears watching is the phenomenon of the small hard drive. Apple, with its iPod and iPod Mini, along with their many imitators, have proved that with a small hard drive designed into a clever product you can make big changes in the consumer electronics industry.
This lesson has been taken to heart by many in the storage industry. Companies like Toshiba and Hitachi in Japan and the privately held Cornice in the United States are creating ever smaller drives, that can pack a few gigabytes of storage on them, and they could start showing up in cell phones and PDAs as regular components as early as this year.
Today chipmaker Agere Systems announced new technology for chips that go inside hard drives. The new chips are aimed at helping hard drive manufacturers meet new demand for putting media files of all types--music, video, and whatever else you can think of--on an increasingly wide array of consumer electronics.
The article goes on to discuss some of the devices small hard drives might be used in, and the challenges of creating drives cheap enough to be purchased by the average consumer. You can read the full article at Forbes.
The Mac Observer Spin:
While it is certainly interesting to ponder what sort of gadget goodies other folks might come up with, it is a pastime for Apple watchers to imagine what sort of coolness Apple is cooking up. There's lots of possibilities tossed around in the article, everything from cell phones to new kinds of PDAs.One point we'd like to make, however, is that we find it hard to believe that a lot of people would find a use for a phone with a hard drive in it. Cell phones must be small, and while it is interesting to use them to take an occasional photo, they will likely never replace a dedicated camera, even for folks who just take snap-shots.
We've also found that combo-phone devices usually fall short; they are either too large to be a good cell phone, or too small to do much beyond some basic PDA functions. There are a few exceptions, of course, but having gigabytes of capacity in a cellphone seems like it could be a waste. Still, it will be interesting to see what device makers come up with.
Observer Comments
I agree with your point about phones. I'm noticing 2 trends in cell phones: bigger and smaller. They are attempting to bring the PDA into the phone:phone, camera, internet, email, etc. The other school is making them downright tiny.
One note: a 3mp camera phone was announced from Japan last week I believe...
Currently an 8 gig CF card is around $6K so I would expect these drives to have a big impact on professional digital photography and also have a presence in DV cameras.
Talk some about replacing the laptop with a similar device that is even more mobile, say, something wearable.
Recall the scene in the movie "Lost in Space" where the girl keep a video journal on her wristwatch...a bit far fetched maybe, but we sure know how tiny cameras are now.
codec3
"There are a few exceptions, of course, but having gigabytes of capacity in a cellphone seems like it could be a waste. "
Yeah, and not too many years ago I found it hard to imagine that any computer would EVER need even a gig of HD space! Well, desktop video editing took care of that pretty quickly!
History has shown us that, if you provide the disk space, somebody will come up with something to fill it with. I don't doubt that the manufacturers will find some cool Mb-hungry killer app to eat up a Gb of space on a cell phone. It's like buying a bigger house with more closets: before you know it its filled to the rafters with crap again!
If they can put these little drives in cameras and camcorders and do it cheaply enough, before long we'll all be filling them up with HDTV-quality video and 50 megapixel stills, and wondering how we EVER put up with the horrible quality of the previous generation's quality. Fun to ponder the possibilities, huh?
Personally I rhought that all those incompatible memory cards (CF, SD, Memory Stick, etc) would never survive either, but little internal HDs could finally kill off that overpriced mess of competing formats once and for all! I'm looking forward to seeing these mini drives come to market, as long as they don't repackage them in a dozen proprietary removable formats again!
Which reminds me-- Does anyone remember that little removable cartridge that Iomega (or somebody) ALMOST came out with? I think it was called "Clik." It was about the size of a matchbook, and was going to be the next big thing for dgital cameras, but then it died on the vine and was never released.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? 
-Ken P
Thu May 27, 2004 12:22 pm Subject: While we're pondering...
... an idea just popped into my head: Setup a bunch of mini HDs as a RAID inside of a laptop! Sweeeeet!
Seriously, the Army would want this. There is a limit to how bulletproof you can make a laptop, but if you have two mirrored drives on opposite sides of the case with plate between them, you have a good chance that an armor piercing round would only destroy one drive, and data from the other could be recovered.
hella cool idea for RAID... wonder if this will make into the next roung of "toughbooks"
Quotealgr wrote:
... an idea just popped into my head: Setup a bunch of mini HDs as a RAID inside of a laptop! Sweeeeet!
Seriously, the Army would want this. There is a limit to how bulletproof you can make a laptop, but if you have two mirrored drives on opposite sides of the case with plate between them, you have a good chance that an armor piercing round would only destroy one drive, and data from the other could be recovered.
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