RealTechNews.com - Independent Tech

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Western Digital Enters One-Inch Hard Drive Market
Western Digital is taking on the one-inch hard drive market today with a spanking new 6GB screamer. Our pals at Trusted Reviews had this to say: "The one-inch hard drive will spin at 3,600 RPM and have an access time of 12ms. It will be available in capacities up to 6GB. This new hard drive will be offered with the standard CF II interface form factor enabling it to fit into millions of currently available devices as well as future products. It will feature WD's anti-skip technology that helps deliver uninterrupted audio and video playback and will also incorporate WD's patent-pending advanced power management techniques to enable the longest possible battery life." Rock on!

# Permalink Posted at 10:10 AM 3 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

Seeing as how almost all computers now have CF readers (or you can buy them for about $20 anyway) I bet these little buggers will quickly replace traditional external hard drives. They'd be extremely convenient to carry around and with a 6GB capacity, large enough for just about anything. The only "problem" is the speed which is still slower than current external hard drives, but that's not really a problem unless you're doing DV work or routinely transferring huge amounts of data. I do wonder, though, how durable these things are going to be.

# posted by David 11:19 AM

(Good Lord, could this software be any slower?)

Seeing as how almost all computers now have CF readers (or you can buy them for about $20 anyway) I bet these little buggers will quickly replace traditional external hard drives.I would doubt that very much, for a lot of reasons.

First, recall that these drives have been on the market for years. While they have long offered much better (but steadily less) bang-for-the-buck than CF cards, they have always been very expensive relative to larger drives. The least expensive 4G microdrive I could find on PC Connection's website, for instance, is $258. Roughly the same money gets you a 160G Lacie external drive.

Second, they take pains to tell you about their "12ms" access time, but the real limitation on these drives has always been the CF interface. IIRC it tops out in the 13MB/s range. The previously mentioned 160G drive has a 150MB/s peak data rate (although practically speaking you're likely to see more like 30G/s sustained). Speaking as someone who has been using microdrives in photography for awhile, you can get old waiting for them to transfer a full load of data.

Lastly, you mention durability. These drives are extremely fragile -- they have to be to cram all that stuff into that little box. You can crush one in your fingers, and dropping it on the floor, even while not running, has been known to cause total data loss (as well as loss of the unit). This fragility is alleviated quite a bit by the fact that these drives tend to be inside of some enclosure nearly all the time, but it's still something to consider.

The window for viability of these drives is going to be short, only a few years. CF densities already exceed microdrive densities (8G cards are on the market now), and cost per gig has been dropping like a rock: The 1G card I paid $300 for about a year ago is now $99.

With climbing densities and falling prices CF cards will likely be more cost effective than microdrives within two years, and are considerably more durable and draw less power.

In the meantime, if you're looking for tiny storage devices there are tons of keychain USB drives on the market that are much more convienent than microdrives and, while they don't offer quite the storage, you can put quite a lot of stuff on a 1G keychain drive.

# posted by Jim Frost 2:32 PM

I was referring mainly to people who use external hard drives for storing things like mp3's. That is what I see them used for most of the time.

# posted by David 3:32 PM

Post a Comment