News Tiny hard drive packs a big punch

"You could soon be able to store much more on a MP3 player, digital camera or mobile phone.

Toshiba has developed a tiny hard drive which measures less than an inch across but can hold between two and four gigabytes of data. "

Full story from the BBC: here

And another thread about it: here

 

"Have you seen my HDD around? It was sitting on the table just a second ago..."
"Ummm... I thought that was a piece of candy..."

Okay, so maybe not yet, but someday HDD's will be the size of PEZ and you'll lose more HDD's to accidental ingestion rather than failure .

 

Also here.

Good stuff these mini HDDs. Although they'll be mightily pricey!

 

I wonder if that's what's in this MP3 player, it doesn'y give the dimensions, but going by the picture it's pretty titchy.

 

I think those are the hdd's that the new mini iPod's are using.

 

May be too soon for that:

but the BBC article does say the Tosh 1.8" drives are used in some iPods.

 

Nearly... the Mini iPod is using Hitachi's 1" disk where as these new Toshiba's are 0.85"...

 

actually, the mini hard drives are all just a marketing ploy. What's really going on is explained here

 

I still feel that HDD technology is not best employed in PDAs, phones, MP3 players, etc... Certainly the drives themselves have very tight tolerances with regard to atmospheric conditions and shock tolerance. Not to mention oxidisation build up on the disc layer from playing all those MP3s.

They would however be useful as part of an initiative to reduce PC form factors, both on the desktop and laptop.

Overall I suspect high density MRAM (or similar) devices are the future in the portable sector. Very resilient to pretty much everything.

 

it's all about the protein memory

 

Your more likely to see MRAM as several large companies such as HP and IBM have huge investments in it.

 

What you guys missed is that Toshiba are going to be producing 200 000 to 300 000 a month which means in comparison to RAM storage these devices should be quite cheep!

 

Not to one-up anyone, but check this out.

I found this on the How Stuff Works CES report. Apparently it is a new storage media that uses quantum technology to store mass amounts of information in very little space. They claim a density of 3.2 GB per mm^3, and they have a USB based storage device that they claim holds 256 GB in a space 4mm * 4mm * 10mm. The device is the size of the metal portion of standard USB plugs. They also have a "replacement drive" on their site that is the size of a standard HD, but holds 140 * 256 GB chips for a total of 35 TB of space. The devices have no moving parts, are non-volitile, write at 6 GB/sec, read at 8 GB/sec, and have a 1.1 ns cycle time. They claim that current costs are $150/GB, or $50/GB for a cheaper version.

I was fairly skeptical at first, but I also looked up the patent that they have filed, and it is very detailed. The story may be pie-in-the-sky, but it is worth a look.

Links:
How Stuff Works CES Coverage
Atom Chip Website
Device Patent 5,841,689

 

It sure would be nice to have a 35 TB HD, but at a price of nearly 1.8 million $US ( or for the more expensive nearly 5.4 million $US) , I think I can settle with my 80 Gb that cost me about 79 bucks.

 

Totally, but then look at how much any new technology cost when it was first invented. Once WD or Maxtor (or Microsoft ... ) purchase it so that a big company is using the technology instead of two professors, the price will drop a lot.

Just imagine what this could do for storage, there would be no RAM (this is way faster read/write than ram, and non-volatile), all a computer's storage would be kept in this medium.

People could have a keychain that contains their "data". This keychain could start your car, and then alow your car stereo access to your mp3s or DVDs. It could take the place of a briefcase, carrying all of your importent documents from the report you need to hand in at work to your schedule. With a device so small and rugged, this could be an extremely big change in how we think of digital storage.

 

I totally agree with you. This is way better than anything I have seen in recent years. The sheer capacity on a device that is so small is amazing. It could indeed be used for literally everything. You could abolish the credit card as we know it. A credit card sized device, just little thicker, could hold at least 90 256MB chips. It could indeed start your car with an onboard code, buy you a soda at the machine, store pictures from a camera, and be your PCs hard drive, or our laptops for that matter. And when it comes right down to it, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than RAM today. I mean, on mbx.com I can buy a PC2100 512MB chip for 114 bucks, and it is volatile. So, if I go with the cheap stuff, I can get twice the RAM for 64 bucks less....pretty good deal really...I just cant buy 35 TB worth of it. Too bad too, as it would be nice to have it all filled with music. With the average song being about a MB a minute, you could listen to music for over 69 years and never hear the same thing twice. I'm not sure there is that much music I want to listen to. Anyway, I'm ranting now, so I guess I'm done with this post.

 

Sceptical is an understatement, I'm taking this with an ocean of salt! Just like that one unknown company moves the industry on possibly a decade. Managing to bypass the efforts of massive corporations and the equally massive R&D budgets by miles.

"256GB of memory fits in a recording media with the physical dimensions of: length- 10mm, width- 4mm and thickness- 4mm."

That is absolutely mind blowing and rather mind boggling unlikely. Would be nice though

EDIT: Finally I've got them the Gendlin Effect that the whole idea rests on simply doesn't exist!

 

I agree, and I feel that this may be totally false, but the evidence that points toward it being legit:

1. They were at CES (I would think that they would have better control over false tech)
2. The technology was invented by two scientists, I gather from the pages that this is something that they discovered on their own and are trying desperately to make a profit. The company was founded around the discovery (they sure aren't business majors)
3. The Gendlin Effect is named after one of the main scientists. I did a search on the Gendlin Effect on Google and was unable to find anything either, however it may be a fairly new discovery, and it also may not be known enough to be widely published online. I am a Computer Scientist, if I invented a new algorithm for solving mazes, and called it the Randland Algorithm, I wouldn't expect it to surface in google for several months/years.
4. The patent is VERY indepth, including extremely detailed descriptions on how to manufacture the drive, as well as how it works. This patent looks legitimate to me, although I am not an expert in Quantum Optics, and it seems feasible.
5. This isn't the only extremely dense storage technology that is being looked into. There is a process that involves filling spherical protiens with a magnetic cobalt-platinum compound and then burning a layer of these onto a surface that could yeild 3 - 5 TB of info per cm^2. So either way, soon our "archaic" storage medium will be obsolete.

 

Let's be brutally honest, those that have been watching have seen this type of thing before. Somebody makes a big noise about their new data storage technology that's going to change the face of computing (usually some type of solid state), and before you know it, it's disappeared and faded into obscurity after delivering on none of it's promises.

Bottom line, I'll believe it when I can buy it.


(plus, they refered to cold fusion as a 'hoax', which is just plain silly )

 

As much as I would love to believe in this stuff, and as much as it is cool, and it would indeed change the face of computing and many other things, it could be a hoax. It looks legit to me, and I certainly hope that it is. The term quantum-optical to me just sounds like a glorified term for holographic memory. It basically says the same thing on their site.

" Beam splitter devides a laser beam to reference and object beams. Then spatial light modulator imposes the image of data to be stored onto an object beam, and through a transform lens focuses interference figure (of the image) from object and reference beams onto an are 1µm in diameter in a particular region in recording media. In order to record information to a recording media an electromagnetic field is formed, which allows to fix the light interference figure (of the image) on the focused area. In order to record numerous words onto the same area, the angle where the reference beam crosses the object beam is changed. This is done using the invented ultra-high speed optoelectronic mirror.

The data is retrieved by disconnecting the object beam and allowing only the reference beam with necessary angle of multiplex transformation to pass through the recording media. The source of the electromagnetic in the recording media is also disconnected, being needed only during the recording of information. Light image from the recording media is projected onto a matrix decoder where optical display is transformed into digital electrical signals."

That is the description of how the device actually works, and it sounds just like holographic RAM to me, which has been being studied for years already. It is quite possible that they have simply stumbled onto a way to do this more easily than any of the major corporations. I believe that IBM hasbeen researching holographic RAM for sometime, and may still have information on their RD site about it. IBM or Intel, I can't remember which. In any case, the tech has been being studied for some time, and to me it seems plausable, in that I-don't-know-a-whole-lot-about-physics-so-I-will-take-their-word-for-it kinda way. In any case, I won't hold my breath, but it would be damned cool.

EDIT: It aslo seems to me that actually 4 x 4 x 10mm device is the storage medium only. It does not appear to be the recorder or anything else, essentially, only the platters from your hard disk. Here's a linkie http://www.atomchip.com/_wsn/page3.html that shows some pics on their page...looks to me like you need the decoder and everything else, which is much larger. This to me, makes the tech seam all the more pheasable.