Comments on: Hitachi claims leap in drive density

Hard drives are climbing to greater storage heights, and that could mean 20GB iPod Minis.

[wrwjpn]

I would like ..

to see these hard disks put into digital video cameras instead of mini pods or the likes. Then transferring the data from camera to PC would take less time. Then we could really record hours instead of 1 hour or less.

This is news?

That's funny, I have had my 20GB iRiver since December and should have spent the extra cash to get the 40GB model that was also available back then.

[Rusdude]

You have different HDD

Yes, this is news! If you don't know, there're two basic formats for hard-disk based music players: "large" (20/30/40/60/80 Gb) and "small" (4/5/6 Gb). Larger drives are in regular iPods/iRiver, while smaller are in iPod mini's and Creative/iRiver equivalents.

The article refers to the "small" hard drives, so an increase of over 300% is significant :)

[landlines]

Technology "Leap" or improved "Just enough to notice"?

My longstanding rule of thumb is that computer speed and/or storage improvements are just barely noticeable to the end user if they are a 3X improvement.

We don't buy anything new for our business unless it is at LEAST 4X better (faster or bigger capacity) than what we had before.

[NWLB]

Sure its news.

Its news because I?m sitting on a very capable two year old machine with a 120 GB drive. I?m looking down the road to 2006 when I start using a pair stand-alone systems to serve as massive central storage units for my family network, along with a full backup. Knowing where the size of drives will go is of real value. It also stands to reason there will be a lot of work done on making RAID easier for the common user to install and use. It also points to some directions things may go in over the next few years.


NWLB

http://www.nwlbnet.blogspot.com

[CBS Orchestra]

Yes, It Is

The iRiver 20GB drive is a 1.8 inch form factor. Hitachi's development will shrink that by a factor of almost 50%. Hence, news.