This tiny 4 gigabyte .85 inch hard drive is going to be available in quantity next month! That does seem to change things. Toshiba wants to sell these little guys to makers of mobile phones, PDAs and MP3 players.
The drive runs at 3600 rpm and weighs less than 10 grams. That is 1/3rd of an ounce. Seems like you could compete pretty well with the iPod mini with a drive like this in a cell phone. No wonder Apple is working with Motorola on an iPod phone of some sort. Looks like the disk is smaller and much thinner than a quarter or maybe a nickel.
I have to laugh when wondering if you could fit one of these into an iPod shuffle. Or... imagine carrying a 4 gig drive on your keychain. You could certainly carry around more than your entire medical history on that. Lots of xrays - whatever. Movies. When I think about pacemakers being implanted, then I think what if one of these were implanted? You could store lots of interesting stats in that thing. Researchers would love it.
This kind of miniaturization could really help create a small machine that could run OS X. Maybe that's stretching it a little. How about OS X light? [via The Register]
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