Marshall Brain's Blog

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Tiny Drives

The new micro-hard-drive from Cornice is sparking a mini-revolution in consumer electronics. The drive holds 1.5 gigabytes of data but only costs about $60 in quantity, making it much cheaper than Flash memory.



The Cornice Storage Element, a miniature hard drive

The Cornice drive measures 5mm x 42.8mm x 36.4 mm (7,800 cubic mm) and weighs 14.6 grams. It can easily fit inside things like digital cameras, MPG camcorders, MP3 players, USB disk drives and so on.

Besides the small size, the thing that is so interesting about this drive is the approach the manufacturer took. The drive is not packaged as a stand-alone, removable part. Instead, it's designed to be glued right onto the product's motherboard. It integrates into the product and uses the product's CPU and memory. This approach helps keep the size down and the price low. It also reduces power consumption.

Here are some comparisons:

• A Memory Stick measures 2.8mm x 21.5mm x 50mm (3,000 cubic mm). Memory Sticks with capacities up to 1GB are available, but the list price is in the $500 range right now.
  
  
• Hitachi makes a microdrive that fits into the CompactFlash form factor -- 5mm x 43mm x 36mm (7,740 cubic mm).
  
  
  
  The Hitachi/IBM Microdrive
  
  This drive is available in capacities up to 1GB and costs about $200 right now.
  
  
• The Apple iPod uses PCMCIA form factor drives permanently mounted in the device. Competitors to the iPod are using removable 5GB (or larger) PC Card drives -- 5mm x 54mm x 85.5mm (23,000 cubic mm). These drives currently cost about $250.
  
  
  
  
  Apple iPods go all the way up to 30 gigabytes at the moment.