Seagate Unveils 12GB 1-Inch Hard Drive

By the Betanews Staff | Published February 13, 2006, 2:35 PM

As consumer devices such as phones and MP3 players continually shrink, storage has remained a persistent drawback that limits their usefulness. Seagate thinks it may have found the answer thanks to perpendicular recording technology. The disk maker on Monday unveiled a 12-gigabyte drive squeezed into a 1-inch form factor.

The new ST1.3 drive doubles the capacity of Seagate's current 1-inch drive, while reducing its footprint by 23 percent and utilizing 30 percent less power. Seagate is targeting the drive at the mobile phone market, which has been converging with digital media to offer users audio and video capabilities while on the go. The ST1.3 is expected to begin shipping in the third quarter of 2006.

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It can take 2000g's of shock, holy cow!

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They were talking about writing with atoms on a quartz crystal 15 years ago... You could hold the whole internet with a crystal the size of your hand.. who cares about hard drives.. make one the size of an eraser... it just means smaller mp3 player, computer or cellphone... big whoop..

YAY!!! MY MP3 PLAYER IS SO SMALL I CANT SEE IT!

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Success! We are forced to buy more MP3 players as we lose our prior ones! And the economoy booms.

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PDA also need this harddisk. I think PDA maker need to think to make multi purpose device, so we did not need to buy MP3 player or Video player or IPOD.
There is huge market in this area. and I believe it is not difficult to create such product if they really do the research and produce great product

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Where I would like to see this is in wearable computers.

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improving technology is always a good thing, but it is also scary in a way. Work for NASA? Get yourself a pen that has a hidden drive in it, connect a usb cable, and take some stuff home. It is getting too easy to steal data from work now. Oh well--that's why my job's computers have no cdrom or floppy drives and the usb ports are disabled in the password-protected bios...

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users can always take photos of the screen, email the data to them selves or even just sneak past into the serverhall and steal a hdd or two:)

it seams that your employer is more likely to be avoiding viruses.

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cool,
comming soon mp3 phones with a sumwhat decent capacity, but ill wait for atleast 30 gig phones, my players got 20, and even thats too little.

rijp:"however with portable devices, like the MP3 players, mechanical devices have a tendency to skip"

havent had my sony nw-hd5 skip a singel time yet,

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I like this idea, however with portable devices, like the MP3 players, mechanical devices have a tendency to skip.. so this may not be good for things on the move. Flash drives are better for this application, but I prefer hard drives better than Flash drives, simply because flash is volatile ram, it a electrical current or some magnet can easily erase the data, at least on a drive the data seems safer.

Perhaps someone can speculate on whether there is any real difference in the medium.. I realize its still electromagnetic material, so maybe I am incorrect in assuming one is better than the other for long term storage..

Then again, I am looking for a portable, bootable solution that I don't have to keep a laptop for.. Like a quick fix drive to keep in my pocket, and if it gets erased, I can always reinstall...

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"I like this idea, however with portable devices, like the MP3 players, mechanical devices have a tendency to skip.."

Where did you get that from? Hard drive players have a memory buffer to keep them from skipping. My 40GB player has never skipped.

I definitely agree though that solid state drives are better for portable use (heck for any use period). I can't wait until solid-state internal hard drives become standard for PCs.

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You can get it now if you don't need a ton of space.

http://www.anandtech.com...age/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

http://www.memtech.com/m...sh-drives-products.html

Not ready for consumer disk pricing though haha.

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Yeah. I've seen those. I don't like the idea of taking my already thin PCI bandwidth for drive access though, and the capacity isn't anywhere near what I'll need when/if I finally buy one of those.

I'm patiently waiting for a good drive. =)

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Some of them plug right into a SCSI or IDE bus though. ;-)

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As soon as they connect to SATA II, I'm buying =)

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Dunno if it's SATA II or not, but it claims 256GB and SATA.

http://www.simpletech.com/oem/zeus/

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Wow...

That... I had not seen.

Thanks for the link =)

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Nice.

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yay !! ...
more space means more pr0n on the go ....
sweet

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