Storcard 5 gigs on a creditcard?

[NeuralChaos]

http://www.storcard.com

I don't have the technical understanding to comprehend how this product works, but it simply seems amazing. I'd like to hear you guys' thoughts on the viablity of this product. Neededless to say there the 5 gig pitchline is a marketing, but dang. Even at 1 gig it'd be amazing, just imagine the applications.

 

[stebesplace]

Well, I can't say this falls under highly technical, but i'll give my thoughts. I can see this happening one day, but not anytime soon. Remember awhile back when popular science did an article on a digital film canistor that can fit inside regular 35mm slr camera's? That was a complete hoax per say, in that the tehnology was never there, and still is not, to introduce such a thing. This may fall under that same catagory for awhile here.

-Steve

 

[blahblah99]

The highest density storage I've seen proof of is Panasonic's 1GB Compact-flash type of card. They were demo'ing it this year at CES along with their half-dollar sized mp3 player that uses that 1GB card. I have pictures on my digital cam I can show, but I'm too lazy to set it up.

 

[dejitaru]

3.5 floppy - 700K
3.5 Super Disk 120MB

Technology advances, you pack the bits more tightly.

I'm no fan of magnetic storage, but it's still a nice thing.
Since people already carry cards and magnetic cards, this could get fairly big with support.

But who needs five gigs on their ATM card?

 

[NeuralChaos]

don't need 5 gigs on my atm card, but a 5 gig mp3 player the size of a creditcard modem would be nice. PDA's with divx movie storage would be nice as well.

 

[Shalmanese]

What worries me is that its actually mechanical media rather than electrical. ie: a small spinning Hard Drive. I can imagine the failure rate of these things when they are first introduced. Nobody is going to want to replace their credit card every 3 months.

 

[stebesplace]

Hey is it true that the new ipods comming out will have video capabilities, to either hook up to a tv, or play on the small screen? with a 20 gig drive, you could hold a few movies, and a crapload of music files. That would be fairly nice in an airport.

-Steve

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Shalmanese
What worries me is that its actually mechanical media rather than electrical. ie: a small spinning Hard Drive. I can imagine the failure rate of these things when they are first introduced. Nobody is going to want to replace their credit card every 3 months.

Agreed; I think there was another post about this in another section of the forums here; these things had better have a reinforced tritanium alloy similar to those used in the hull of the Defiant in Star Trek - these things are going to take a beating. Too many people can't seem to keep their credit cards in good usable condition, and that just has a magnetic stripe on it. Now they want a whole hard drive?
We really need to get away from all these mass-media storage devices with moving parts. The rest of the computer is powering ahead rapidly - data transfer is measured in GB/sec and we're concerned about the nanoseconds of reaction time, billionths of a second! Hard drives are stuck with MB/sec and milliseconds of access time.

Originally posted by: NeuralChaos
don't need 5 gigs on my atm card, but a 5 gig mp3 player the size of a creditcard modem would be nice. PDA's with divx movie storage would be nice as well.

This seems more plausible - I imagine you'd be more likely to keep the Storcard safer if you've got it with a PDA. You could store plenty of video on it too, as the size of the viewing window would be really limited, at least until they integrate TV-output into PDA's.

 

[NeuralChaos]

The StorCard product has a shutter design that is locked when the card is not inserted into the reader mechanism. The shutter is designed to maintain a small spacing with the covers over a finite distance. This space acts as a labyrinth seal restricting particles from entering the disk housing. The StorReader has a flexural seal that restricts particles from entering the reader when a StorCard is not insert into the mechanism. This seal is designed to move in a plane perpendicular to the mechanism, and upon insertion of the StorCard a seal is established between the reader and the card surfaces restricting entry of environmental contaminants. The GMR transducer in the recording head has a thin layer of Carbon deposited on it to prevent corrosion. The disk is also coated with a layer of Carbon and a topical lubricant, similar to the HDD. During operation liners attached to the StorCard walls, similar in construction to the Floppy diskette, wipe the disk. Finally, the flexible metal disk is orders of magnitude harder than the Mylar disk and will not scratch easily. It is also harder than the Aluminum hard disk.

Not quite sure what the rest of it's saying but I think the emphasized part implies that it'll be somewhat rugged. Of course it's all marketing.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: NeuralChaos

Not quite sure what the rest of it's saying but I think the emphasized part implies that it'll be somewhat rugged. Of course it's all marketing.

Isn't that what floppy disks use? Or something similar? They don't really stand up to a whole lot of abuse - and they don't have all the moving parts of a hard drive. This should be interesting though to see how this Storcard turns out.

 

[dejitaru]

There are plenty of small storage devices available. How is this any better.
The Zip Drive was nice. What ever happened to that?