A Hard Drive smaller than a Quarter

Toshiba showed off the world's smallest hard drive with a 0.85" form factor. The 4GB drive featured a spindle speed of 3600RPM and weighed less than 10 grams.

Toshiba expects the drive to be used in cell phones and other portable devices later this year.

Although Toshiba says the drive features a "rugged" design we are still wary of putting a storage device with moving parts in something as frequently abused as a cell phone.

On display next to the 4GB 0.85" hard drive was a 1.8" perpendicular recording drive with a capacity of up to 80GB.

We explained the benefits of perpendicular recording here. To recap from our article: "What perpendicular recording does is it records, or magnetizes, bits vertically through the platter instead of horizontally which efficiently conserves surface area which, in turn, results in the effective doubling of the areal density of the platter." The end result in this case is a very small 80GB drive.

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  • quanta - Friday, January 13, 2006 - link

    From page 8:

    quote:

    Like LCD and DLP technologies, SED displays are fixed pixel displays and there are three electron emitters per pixel. The downside to a fixed pixel display of course is that you end up sacrificing quality if you display content isn't at the same resolution as the native resolution of your display.


    Actually, that only exist if at least 1 dimension of display content dimensions isn't integer divisor of display's native resolution. Secondly, DLP can overcome this by shining at only the biggest subset of mirror in the DMDs that do not cause distortions, then use adjustable sets of lenses to perform zooming, with each set zooming at only 1 axis.
  • Kensei - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link

    Please do a review of this thing when it becomes available. I'd love to see how its output compares to Blu-ray and HD-DVD. I'm sure it's not as good... but just how much worse is what I'd like to know.
  • highlandsun - Thursday, January 12, 2006 - link

    Samsung has pretty good scaling technology, but it seems to me this is something you only need in your display. (And Samsung TVs do pretty good upconversion already.) So, kind of silly.
  • VooDooAddict - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link

    Raptor X.

    I feel so guilty. I'm drooling over a hard drive that costs more then a 7800GT.

    I've wanted a windowed Hard drive for ages though... but don't have the dremmel skills nessesary to add a window to an existing drive.
  • Questar - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link

    Nobody has the dremel skills. Drives are assembled in clean rooms. Beaking the seal will be the end of a drive.
  • Clauzii - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link

    I´ve seen a drive approx. a year ago on the net - modded with blue light - woring - 20Gig. Damn where was it....?
  • Clauzii - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link

    But also found this .. it´s nothing new .......
  • Clauzii - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link

    This: http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Transparent_20disk_...">http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Transparent_20disk_...
  • Clauzii - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link

    woring = working...
  • Eris23007 - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link


    I've noticed lately that article text seems to disappear a few seconds after page load, frequently when one of the sidebar ads appears. Can't be retrieved except by highlighting it, moving the page back and forth (so it redraws), etc. Happened on a number of articles over the past week or so...

    IE6/XP-SP2

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