Disk drives to stop shrinking

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in devices next holiday season, will be 20 percent smaller than current mini drives.

Increased storage capacity and packaging reductions will enable hard-drive makers to insert their products into cell phones, which now almost exclusively rely on flash memory.

"People are even talking about building in projector capacity," he said, so that pictures taken on cell phones can be beamed onto flat surfaces for easier viewing, Healy said.

Still, because the platters occupy a significant portion of the overall space in a drive, size reductions are limited. A visual examination of an opened mini drive from Cornice with a 1-inch platter shows that the platter occupies more than half of the surface area. Another substantial portion is taken up by the hard-drive arm.

Reducing platter size is also constrained by the fact that a motor sits in the middle of the platter.

"Any time you shrink the disk, you halve the capacity," said Dave Reinsel, an analyst at IDC. Toshiba's 0.85-inch drive maxes out at 4GB. Consequently, 0.5-inch drive would be limited to 2GB of capacity, which would be hard-pressed to compete against flash chips on price.

This is potentially troubling for the disk drive industry because flash memory chips will relentlessly continue to economize on real estate and cost per memory bit. Moore's Law will reduce the cost of chips and enable manufacturers to increase memory capacity at the same time. Novel packages will let manufacturers stack four chips in a space that traditionally held one. Advanced Micro Devices will also come out with flash chips that hold four bits per cell rather than two bits.

Ultimately, if flash improves at a slightly faster rate than mini drives do, it could enable flash to scrape away market share in some areas. Flash might not be competitive at the high end of the market, where 10GBs or 20GBs are needed, but it might get more competitive for midrange devices.

"You've got flash on the other side that is growing," Reinsel said.

The notion that platters will stop shrinking is somewhat ironic, considering that they are just beginning to sell after a 10-year coming-out party. IBM invented the mini drive back in the early 1990s but couldn't commercially exploit it. IBM then sold its hard-drive division to Hitachi in 2002.

Hitachi then landed its drive in the iPod Mini, a popular portable music player that Apple Computer debuted a year ago.

[katamari]

Fantastic!

This is absolutely WONDERFUL -- and no, I am not in jest.

I would LOVE to see present-day 3.5" hard disks return to the 5.25" form factor. Hard disk failure rates and stability have been the #1 problem since the absurd volume growth of hard disks. What used to work almost flawlessly in a 3.5" form factor (~400-800MByte) now fails regularly because we're pushing 400-500GB per drive.

I'd much rather see solid-state mass storage make an appearance in this day and age (such as holographic storage, or alternate technology IBM was working on), since the 2nd common failure point for hard disks are the mechanics -- i.e. moving parts.

In the meantime, manufacturers, PLEASE help restore stability of your own products by bringing back 5.25" form factor drives. Besides, 90% of the PCs out there have 3 or 4 5.25" drive bays which remain empty and do nothing -- I'd rather have hard disks there, with proper cooling, along with the cables being kept up away from the mainboard components (therefore inducing CPU and RAM thermal issues).

As for laptop users -- you're out of luck. Hope for silicon-based storage mediums in the gigabyte range, such as 20-40GB USB pen drives...