Miniature Hard Drives Make a Comeback?

January 17th, 2008

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Miniature hard drives used to be the future for consumer electronics when flash memory was still outrageously prohibitive. It didn't took long for NAND to catch in both capacity and pricing. Other than HDD-based iPods, Hi-def camcorders are where you will find miniature HDDs. During this year CES, Samsung and Toshiba respectively announced their 1.3" and 1.8" power-efficient drives, the largest of which top at a whopping 120GB - a capacity which may be offered by Apple in the future in its MacBook Air.

LaCie has picked up Samsung 30GB and 40GB for its USB KeyMax. With a metal chassis, the credit card-sized drive comes with an integrated USB cable that you can pull out and tuck back in. This drive rotates at 3600 rpm and can hit 15MB/s. The Toshiba, on the other hand, offers something bigger at 60GB, 80GB and 120GB. These drives spin at 4200 rpm, and despite of the higher rotation speed, will definitely work as USB bus-powered no matter how cheap your USB port is.

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