CES 2004: In a feat of miniturization Toshiba has today revealed it is working on the worlds first sub 1 inch Hard Disk Drive. The new 0.85 inch HDD will have a capacity between 2 and 4 GB. This new device is clearly aimed at the portable music / multimedia players, PDA's and pocket notebook PC's. However it's not a far stretch to imagine these HDD's in use in digital cameras and 'cross over' products which also shoot digital video. Press release here. News.com has an article suggesting this new HDD will be used in the iPod minis.
Wonder how expensive they will be though seeing as the Mini iPod came out at $250. However using them in PDAs and digital cameras is definitely a huge step forward
Quantum Optical Drives Forum thread on this topic, as well as my post regarding a new process that fits 256 GB (that's right Gigabytes) in a module the size of a USB connector