Start-up company Cornice has developed a 1.5GB, 1-inch diameter hard drive for consumer-electronics devices that the company says will be cheaper, smaller and hold more data than some other mini-hard drives or flash-memory cards...
In big quantities, the drive could be sold to manufacturers by around $65, compare that to over $200 a flash card or IBM's 1-inch microdrives could cost, Samsung and other MP3 player manufacturers have shown interest for the drive already.
The Cornice drive is essentially a minimalist hard drive that has been shorn of any materials not needed for portable electronics. The drive, for instance, doesn't have its own internal, dedicated pool of memory; instead, it uses the memory shared by the rest of the device to cache data. The SE doesn't have rails, so it can't be removed from the host device; by contrast, the drive is planted on the motherboard, and transfers of files are accomplished through USB (universal serial bus) ports.
Read more: CNet News.