Credit Card-Size Hard Drive Can Hold 5GB - for $15

[mubs]

Here.

 

[CougTek]

Wow, awesome :

Also, the card--like a credit card--is extremely flexible, without risking damage to the data it contains,...

It must not be very fast though, but still. I don't think it can be slower than a 3½ floppy disk reader. We need this in evey PC so that we can finally get rid of the utter obsolescence that the 1.44MB disk is.

 

[Cliptin]

Dude!

"The card actually has moveable parts inside its thin shell," says Bill Heil, vice president of StorCard.

A spinning wheel made of Mylar is engaged when the card is inserted into a StorReader, a USB-connected drive or PC Card that reads and writes to the StorCard. The reader is expected to retail for under $100 and the cards for under $15 each, Heil says.

 

[Fushigi]

I wonder about that flexibility. More than that, I wonder how much surface pressure it can take w/o damaging the data. Basically, could I carry it in my wallet with my credit cards? None of them are perfectly flat anymore and, of course, they bear a proportional amount of my weight whenever I sit down.

Still, if it works it could be pretty cool. Take a housing the size of a deck of playing cards, insert 4 of these, and have a RAID-5 array that fits in your shirt pocket. Build in 802.11a/b/g and a lithium-ion battery and you've got portable, wireless NAS. OK, no one needs that, but the idea is pretty cool.

- Fushigi

 

[jtr1962]

Note that they said from 100MB up to 5GB. It's probably the 100 MB size that's $15 for now. Still, an intriguing idea, and if the 5GB can eventually be made available for $15 to $20, we might finally have a decent floppy replacement at hand. Too bad it's still based on a spinning disk. I would love for this thing to become solid-state based. Reliability and access time of solid-state storage is a couple of orders of magnitude above disk-based solutions.

 

[Splash]

Note that they said from 100MB up to 5GB. It's probably the 100 MB size that's $15 for now. Still, an intriguing idea, and if the 5GB can eventually be made available for $15 to $20, we might finally have a decent floppy replacement at hand. Too bad it's still based on a spinning disk. I would love for this thing to become solid-state based. Reliability and access time of solid-state storage is a couple of orders of magnitude above disk-based solutions.

ClearCard is solid state and can hold (potentially) around 60 GB -- in the laboratory -- when and if it ever finally becomes a commercial product. With ClearCard, the card is read with a scanning head and does not move.

 

[jtr1962]

ClearCard is solid state and can hold (potentially) around 60 GB -- in the laboratory -- when and if it ever finally becomes a commercial product. With ClearCard, the card is read with a scanning head and does not move.

I really hope this makes it out of the lab. 60 GB would be perfect for backup-everything I have will fit on one card and I don't even need to compress it with some backup software. Just copy the files straight from my hard drive. Something this size will also be ideally suited for video, so I could easily see these replacing VHS tapes-they should be good for 20 to 30 hours of DVD quality video.

 

[Cliptin]

I have not seen anything about the products meantioned in this thread that implies the transfer rate will be anything to write home about.

 

[mubs]

From the first link:

StorCard promises the tiny hard drive will provide high performance to quickly handle large amounts of data. It will support a volume sufficient to stream media files, for example, according to Heil.

How it actually turns out is anybody's guess, of course. But we can hope and be greedy, can we not? :mrgrn:

 

[Prof.Wizard]

This will change our storage lives... seriously! 8)

 

[Cliptin]

From the first link:

StorCard promises the tiny hard drive will provide high performance to quickly handle large amounts of data. It will support a volume sufficient to stream media files, for example, according to Heil.

How it actually turns out is anybody's guess, of course. But we can hope and be greedy, can we not? :mrgrn:

I wonder if the word "volume" is some translation snafu.