Samsung shows off world's biggest 1.8-inch drive: 160GB

Samsung seems hell-bent on cramming every bit of data it can onto a 1.8-inch drive platter -- just two months after announcing the former capacity champ 120GB SpinPoint N2, the company is pre-announcing a 160GB version. Other than the size, the essential stats remain the same: 4200RPM, 15ms seek time, sub-1W power consumption.
No work on pricing or availability, but our 80GB iPod is beginning to look positively cramped.

[Via TGDaily]

[Homeboy @ Aug 21st 2007 8:27AM]

Cool but seriously I have my eyes on SSD drives now. Next year we can expect 32GB/64GB iPod. HDDs in iPod are wack because they fail and die easily.

[Leonard Nimrod @ Aug 21st 2007 8:49AM]

If you think that a 32/64GB SSD iPod Video available next year at at least double the cost of the 80/100/120GB HDD based model (probably) due out this year will emerge, or is even a good idea then you are living in a fantasy world.

Sure HDDs have moving parts which inherently makes them less reliable than SSDs with their lack of moving parts, but 1.8" drive reliability well outweighs the high cost premium and low relative capacity of NAND.

[Homeboy @ Aug 21st 2007 9:19AM]

Leonard Nimrod:
This month iAudio and Creative has announced their 16GB flash DAPs priced at $250, and they are on sale as we speak. Next year they will be doubling that to 32GB for the same price. Flash capacity has been doubled every year for devices like the iPod Nano. I live in reality land while you seem to have been living in a Cave.

1.8 inch HDDs in the iPods are very unreliable. My iPod photo died after 6 month and the replacement I got died after 1 year and 2 month. HDD failure is the most common death cause for the big iPod, resulting in a lot of warranty claims for Apple.

Therefor I bet that Apple are will be happy to switch to Flash for the big iPod as soon as the prices for the high capacity memory chips will go down to a reasonable level, which is at the second half of next year.

[Steve @ Aug 21st 2007 9:32AM]

They tend to fail because they have crappy batteries more than because hard drive failure. And to Leonard's point, Steve isn't going to put SSDs in there if it doubles the cost and puts him too far out of price position. Even with Apple branded products, there is a price the market will bear.

[Phil Perman @ Aug 21st 2007 9:56AM]

I've had the hard drive die in my iPod Photo many times, and most times its been fixed with a firm whack on a solid surface. The problem isn't with the hard drive, its with the cable connecting it to the PCB.

Its still going to be a long time before flash can overtake hard drive in terms of space for your money.

[Constable Odo @ Aug 21st 2007 10:02AM]

Yet my nearly two-year old 30 GB iPod w/Video has not had any trouble with the hard drive or anything else. I'd hardly consider hard drives crappy or failure prone. I obviously have to agree that SSDs are tougher, though.

I've always had good experiences with hard drives for 20 years of computing. Out of about sixteen hard drives, I've only had one fail (spindle bearings gave out) after eight years.

I'd be happy to use that 160 GB drive in the next iteration of iPods.

[bl0nde @ Aug 21st 2007 11:12AM]

@ Homeboy: "HDDs in iPod are wack because they fail and die easily."

Er...maybe if you put them in a blender (sorry). But seriously, hard drives have been in iPods since the very beginning, and just because 6 years on we can realistically speculate about large capacity flash based iPods, that doesn't suddenly make all the hard drive models unreliable and obsolete. I have a 2G 10GB iPod from 2002 that still works fine (even though the battery is nearly gone).
Why can't Apple have a 16/32GB full sized flash iPod for battery life worriers who want to watch videos AND have a 80/100GB+ models for those who want to carry around their entire library, no compromises? Different markets, different products.

[stephen @ Aug 21st 2007 12:59PM]

Keep in mind, though a 32GB SSD may be available next year for $250 (speculation), Apple requires that they make at least 300% if not 400% profit on all their hardware sales.

It will probably be another few years before we see large SSD ipods for reasonable prices.

[Michael @ Aug 21st 2007 8:42AM]

Now the question is, how long has Apple known about this and was it long enough that we can begin rumoring that the next iPod will have one?

[Ratchet the Lombax @ Aug 21st 2007 9:05AM]

This is cool, I recently installed a 100gb Toshiba drive in my 4th gen iPod since I just wanted to see if I could and it worked out great. Now if they have these at some reasonable price say around 250-300 I could install one in my other iPod now that would be cool.

[dwaede @ Aug 21st 2007 9:10AM]

Why is this a big deal? The latest Archos comes with a 160GB version already, and it is already in production.

[Eric @ Aug 21st 2007 9:22AM]

The Archos uses a big honkin' 2.5" drive?

[FK @ Aug 21st 2007 9:25AM]

I bet the worlds biggest 1.8 inch drive is 1.8 inches

[strider_mt2k @ Aug 21st 2007 9:56AM]

They're bigger on the inside, like a T.A.R.D.I.S.

[The General @ Aug 21st 2007 11:19AM]

+'d for Dr. Who reference.

[Ty @ Aug 21st 2007 10:27AM]

The debate as to SSD's making HD's obsolete seems to come up in every portable media player and laptop thread on here. Talk about a hot topic.

Yes, it's inevitable that SSD's will replace HD's in some applications, it's just a matter of companies improving manufacturing to a point where they can make SSD's for less money than they do today, whether companies can save money on warranty-related costs by moving to a more reliable form of storage, and whether candidates for a switch to SSD can afford the storage space decrease.

That said, there is NO indication of how long it's going to take for solid state media to catch hard disks in storage capacity. For portable music players that are intended to go anywhere and endure a significant amount of abuse, the shift to SSD makes sense; it's why I'm going to buy an iPod Nano to replace my 4th generation iPod whenever it decides to die. But I'll also be buying an Archos 605 WiFi with a 160 gig hard drive in it so I can transport all of my music and a handful of movies around with me on travel, or when I'm going over to a friends house and we might want to watch a movie or something.

People who think that there will be 160 gig SSD drives that can be thrown in a device for $400-500 starting next year, or even two or three years from now can keep dreaming. And when they are out, there will be hard drives the size of the one in this post that can hold 320 gigs or more of data. "Homeboy" makes the statement that Creative announced a DAP with a 16 gig SSD for $250 like it was some sort of ground-breaking argument. 16 gigs? Really? That's 1/10 the size of this hard drive, and hard drives increase in size on a yearly basis as well.

Hard drives aren't obsolete yet, and they won't be for a long time.

[Rob @ Aug 21st 2007 10:37AM]

Yes, yes, yes ...
I'd like to install one of these in my iPods.
That'd be sweet. No more deciding on leaving some stuff out because the hdd was full.

[Kaemon @ Aug 21st 2007 12:50PM]

O_o You fill up 60/80 GB? Wow... I don't see how people have that many. At most I have 8gb of music, and thats over a couple YEARS. How much music do you people get >_>

[stephen @ Aug 21st 2007 12:59PM]

@Kaemon - the reason I've not purchased an iPod for the last two years (yes, I'm patient) is my music collection is at 117GB. Therefore if the next gen of hard drive based ipods happen to be 120GB (the pessimist inside me says they will only be 100GB) I'd still have no room to expand on my collection, or to include video's for trips etc.

[Wwhat @ Aug 21st 2007 1:07PM]

It seems weird to me too, music isn't about quantity but about quality isn't it?
But if you want quality I guess you don't use an ipod of course, you'd need a player that can play lossless formats at least, and then you are suddenly looking at a need for a lot of gigs.

[Rob @ Aug 21st 2007 1:29PM]

@Kaemon
You have to keep in mind that people use their PMPs for more than just music.
I've recently bought a 30gig iPod and it's already filled with just videos of movies and tv shows. I have another 20gig for music alone.

It comes in handy during long trips. 160gig hdd inside the iPod would be enough for some time. I'm sure it's going to have some exorbitant price though.

[Scooter @ Aug 21st 2007 6:12PM]

get real. I've got 200+GB of music and I stopped building a long time ago. I'm sure plenty of hogs have much more. Portables have a long way to go to be able to hold desktop collections, though the idea of limiting your media collection to a portable's memory is daft, especially if you want to play video.
There are good reasons why NAS drives are now selling in 4 and 8 TB+ versions (one of them is demand).

[Steve Jobs @ Aug 21st 2007 1:57PM]

Ok guys, You've convinced me: I'll stick one of these puppies in the next Ipod. Just give me a months to shake some trees and rattle some cages and you'll have it in the Apple store for .... $399, and I'll toss-in a rip of Ratatouille and Cars. How does that sound?

[Davin Peterson @ Aug 21st 2007 3:01PM]

iPod's aren't the only player, what about the Creative Zen Vision:M? Creative gets no recognition.

[stickmanfc73_ @ Aug 21st 2007 11:45PM]

Ipods are the only DAPs in the world. I'm sorry but other great companies like Creative and Iriver don't exist.

[jb_engadget @ Aug 21st 2007 3:49PM]

I have an Archos 440 that works great. The only issue is the 20gb hard drive it came with. It's a 1.8" single-platter hard drive, 5mm in height - do you think it might be possible to just swap this new hard drive in??

[jb_engadget @ Aug 21st 2007 5:04PM]

Oops - it's an Archos 400, pardon me.