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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.

These kinds of portable, small USB based storage devices are really getting to be cheaper. And so they should. There's really a market for this kind of thing ever since the floppy started to go the way of the dinosaur and be good only for boot disks and very small amounts of data. And although the floppy may linger for a while, in the mean time I think we shall see a lot of these kinds of devices.

Is that a terrabyte in your pocket or are you just glad to see me???

LOL, I remeber seeing my first 10mb hard drive going "Wow! Who would need all that storage?! That drive must weigh a ton!!!"

It's amazing to think you can fit 512mb on a keychain right now.

Sorry, being nostalgic.... these small hard drives are going to be awesome, though. Can't wait till different devices start coming equipped with them.

yes true i still have a 100 mb drive that is soooooo huge, it's not even IDE

and looking at those usb pens as I have is awesome, IMO

BTW most of the mobos support to boot to those devices that emulate a FDD

so we could have them as bootdisks

t would be great to be able to partition them too to have many boot disks on a single usb drive for example

it's weird because i havent managed to boot from mine. the image was ok, the mobo supports it but it won't work. i searched and posted a thread about that but got no solutions my pobo is a ECS K7S5A PCB 3.1