1.3-inch Disk Drive for CE Coming From Samsung

At next CES in Las Vegas, Samsung Semiconductor will make announcements for three categories of products::

Hard Disk Drive
* The World’s first 1.3-inch Hard Disk Drive for use in mobile consumer devices
* New industry-leading 1 Terabyte 3.5” RAID Edition hard drives
* New 320GB 2.5” hard drives for laptop computing applications

Optical Disc Drive
* TruDirect technology which allows consumers to create DVDs and burn digital content through a PC without the need for a hard drive
* Blu-ray optical disc drives

Flash Memory
* Recent Solid State Drive (SSD) developments:
* Samsung SSDs in Dell / Alienware laptops (and other OEMs soon)
* Improvements make it twice as fast as earlier version (migration to combo SLC/MLC in 2008)
* Video applications on mobile devices driving “fusion” flash memory chips
* Removable flash cards moving to “micro” designs
* New plant in Austin to expand flash supply in the U.S.
* Highest density NAND — 32Gb — to be mass produced soon

Samsung Semiconductor

Comments

The most surprising announcement will be this new 1.3-inch hard disk drive. Only two line of devices is this form-factor have been ever launched:

* The KittyHawk by Hewlett-Packard with Citizen in 1992 (14.4MB and 21.4MB) and in 1993 (42.8MB)

* Two models (175MB and 350MB) in 1996 by PicoDisk, a start-up that disappeared.

But all these products failed to find a market.

Aura Associates, Maxtor and MiniStor were also working on this form-factor around 1992.

Concerning the new Samsung's products, all will depend on its capacity and price compared to flash disks where the Korean company is one of the biggest manufacturer in the world. It seems that this firm likes to challenge its inside teams that are involved in hard disk drives and flash disks. That's a strategy used by IBM to push its R&D.

Here, it will be also interesting to look at the reaction of Seagate and its other competitors.

Samsung will follow Fujitsu, Toshiba and Western Digital in 320GB notebook drives.