Toshiba develops world's smallest HDD
Posted 12/17/2003 @ 12:54 AM, by Hannibal
It's 3GB and about the size of a nickel. Dig it:
December 15, 2003 (TOKYO) -- Toshiba Corp has developed a hard-disk drive that measures 0.85 of an inch in diameter, smaller than the record 1-inch HDD that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies released in November, company sources said on December 13. The drive, which is small enough to be used in mobile phones, can store up to two hours of high-definition moving images and just under 60 hours of music. Its tiny size will likely lead to the development of extremely small video cameras...
Toshiba aims to start shipping samples to makers of cellular phones in summer 2004 and begin full-fledged production in early 2005 at its Ome, Tokyo plant. After order volume rises, production will be moved to its HDD plant in the Philippines.
I was wondering what people would do with 3GB of storage on a mobile phone, and then I remembered this story. Ok, maybe practice of surfing for gigabytes of pr0n on a mobile phone in public will take off in, say, Japan, where my friends report that they've seen people openly looking at bizarre tentacle rape manga on the subway and where schoolgirls' used underpants were at one point available via vending machines (no kidding!), but I have a hard time seeing it take off, here. I imagine a better idea would be a phone/mp3 player with plenty of storage. Heck, if there were a 3GB phone/mp3 player available today I'd replace my dead iPod with it in a heartbeat.
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