1.8 Inch Removable Hard Drives Coming

bedessen writes "According to an article at PCWorld.com, a new type of removable storage known as iVDR will be demonstrated at January's Consumer Electronics Show. The iVDR standard (backed by a consortium consisting of a number of manufacturers) describes a lightweight, compact, removable hard disk drive compatible with a wide range of applications from AV to PC devices. The products on display will come in 2.5" and 1.8" form factors with parallel and serial ATA interfaces. Capacity will start at 80GB for around $170, but manufacturers hope to drop this to under $80 and well as double the capacity by next quarter." Here's hopin'

Desktop machines?

[Malic]

You could make a RAID of these things the size of a couple of decks of cards. And I imagine that they kick out less heat.

Seems like a candidate for use in the next generation iMac...

Just how useful is this going to be?

[John Jorsett]

The consortium plans to approach the movie industry soon and hopes to complete the standardization of its copy protection code by March, next year, Hioki said.

In other words, "we're still working out how to cripple it in a Hollywood-approved way with DRM."

1.8 inch removable hd's have existed for years

[phr2]

They're called PCMCIA drives and the older ones needed a type III slot. Toshiba makes a 5 GB one that fits in a type II slot now, and they make 1.8" embedded drives up to 20 GB that could fit in a type III slot except that their whole production is going to devices like iPod's. I hope they'll do a PCMCIA version soon.

This PCWorld thing is about a drive in some weird bigger enclosure which seems pointless. They should just make higher capacity PCMCIA drives.

are they delicate?

[hfastedge]

just how delicate would these be....it still means nothing if I have to treat it like a baby. Id rather have tape disk still, which is probably way more shock resistant. True, this harddrive is selfcontained.

Do i think the benefits of portability outweigh the fact that its still just a harddrive? No.

Im all for solid state.

IBM?

[Karamchand]

Though I know that IBM has sold its consumer hard drive assets to Hitachi I still have to wonder why IBM is not a member of this consortium, since IBM has a very active and large research department.
Wester Digital is also "missing"...

Anyone who knows more?

Recommendation

[Daengbo]

Sounds like a great partner to these [e-insite.net].
Comments?

Parallel & Serial ATA? Where is Firewire?

[leandrod]

An obsolete connector and other yet vapourware...

Why ignore the relevant, modern, already available standard, Firewire AKA IEEE-1394?

Re:Just how useful is this going to be?

[RicktheBrick]

This would be tremendously useful if someone could figure out how to allow one to go to a store and have both movies and music copied onto the drive. Just think a store could have every copy of every movie and cd ever made and never worry about going out of stock. Someday when one can download at a speed of more than 1 Mega Byte per second than we could eliminate the store and just download our entertainment. At a cost of a dollar per giga byte than it would be cheap enough to store movies(about $4 per movie).

The real purpose: Copy protection

[Brett Glass]

Why is this consortium coming out with a "new" storage standard when so many good ones already exist? The answer can be found at http://www.ivdr.org/consortium/consortium_e.html [ivdr.org], which the three working groups developing the standard. One is doing the hardware, and another is developing a spec for the file system -- neither of which is rocket science. But the third is focused on "security" -- in other words, DRM. This is the main purpose of the entire effort: To get the industry to standardize on a medium that's copy-protected from the get-go.

Re:Just how useful is this going to be?

[kilonad]

What's in it for them? With the storage business having such a low profit margin, it would seem that there's nothing in it for them. Until you realize that once a few companies start doing it, the rest don't want to be caught with their pants down if the *AA come around with their team of lawyers. They probably figure it's just cheaper and easier to do this now (possibly also in preparation for Palladium) than to get tangled up in a huge legal battle later on.

Re:Parallel & Serial ATA? Where is Firewire?

[kangasloth]

How exactly is SATA better than IEEE 1394 (firewire) for internal uses? Do you like being limited to the number of ports the motherboard manufacturer thought was necessary? 1394 allows you to chain devices, akin to scsi - much more convenient.

SATA requires a special power connector too, likely on the motherboard itself. 1394 gives you power too, in one little connector.

Linux certainly does support 1394. When our tape library failed at work, we replaced it with a bunch of firewire disks. Not only do they offer more storage at a lower cost, but they are all simultaneously online and are hell of a lot faster than tape. See linux1394.org [linux1394.org]

Do you really want to perpetuate the cruft that is ATA? You don't need drivers for SATA because it inherits many of PATA's limitations. Personally, i like hotswap (important for software raid) and i like isochonous transfer (good for cd burners as well as video streams). 1394 requires new drivers because it offers more. Linux has no problem reading 1394 drives. Windows has no problem reading 1394 drives. MacOS has no problem reading 1394 drives. How difficult would it have been to boot off of 1394? The only real obstacle is that anachonism - the PC BIOS. Replace with linuxBIOS and you'd be golden.

If Apple and Co had not decided to tax firewire, we would have had this years ago. Back in the days of the FX chipset, intel promised to include 1394 in it's motherboard chipsets, right next to USB. But no. They didn't want to be beholden to a third party, so they went off and invented the abomination that is USB2.

Re:Just how useful is this going to be?

[analog_line]

What's in it for them is avoiding goverment regulatory burdens such as have been threatened in the United States.

While the profit hit may, in the end, truly turn out to be imaginary (I don't honestly believe that any side in this numbers game has the real answer right now) the political clout that the entertainment industry holds is very, very real.