new Toshiba drive

Toshiba (who apparently makes the tiny 5GB hard drive in the iPod 5) has announced some larger-capacity drives in the same size: Toshiba fits 20GB onto 1.8-inch disk [MacCentral]

Though neither company will confirm that the iPod uses Toshiba's drive, representatives of both companies acknowledge Toshiba is the only one producing a 5GB drive small enough to fit in Apple's music player. Gigabytes of storage would also allow handheld devices to contain video files, for example. While she can't name customers, Dalphy says Toshiba is working with a number of companies -- many of them startups -- on a variety of product ideas that could use Toshiba's tiny drives. "If they do make it to market, they will change the way we do things," she says of the unannounced projects in development. Dalphy expects products should start appearing between the middle and the end of 2002, or possibly earlier.

I was fairly underwhelmed by the iPod 5's price/capacity ratio, but knew that surely it wouldn't stay that steeply priced forever. The only questions are, when will they roll out the iPod 20 and how much will it cost? Or, how much will the iPod 5 drop to once the larger capacities come online? We have ~40GB of our own music ripped for our own use, so it's still not enough to hold all of it, but I'd certainly take half. For the right price, that is; the 20GB version still isn't worth $400 (or more likely $500) to me, but I will gleefully watch the price/capacity curve do its thing in the meantime.     6 comment(s)  

This article dissects the iPod. Page 5 has details on the hard drive, model number, etc. I've seen the inside myself (a member of my a cappella group is on the team), it is a tight fit in there, quite remarkable.
      ...posted by Lilly on January 17, 2002 2:43 PM

I've got 20GB clipped to my belt right now (well, not _literally_, as that would be too geeky for words...) -- it's the Archos Studio 20, which cost around $350. Doesn't look as cool as the iPod, and it's USB, not FireWire, but it's still pretty nice.
      ...posted by John Anderson on January 17, 2002 2:50 PM

I've been using an iPAQ 3760 for my mobile music needs, with 1GB internal storage and 48GB of less-convenient portable external drive. My experience leads me to make these three points: 1. Periodically changing the subset of music on a drive that doesn't hold your whole collection is a big pain, no mattter how fast it transfers. Picking out the music in the first place is a tiresome burden. 2. There are no mp3 players with decent playlist management and song selection controls. 3. Having ALL your music with you kicks ass. Having some of your music with you is nice, because then you can listen to stuff you like, but having ALL of it means you can listen to that song that's in your head RIGHT NOW. I'm working on technical fixes to #1 and #2, which is why I got an mp3 player I can reprogram, but the only solution to #3 is massive amounts of storage.
      ...posted by Seth on January 17, 2002 8:01 PM

John: Since it's not at all urgent for me, I'll wait for the smaller, lighter, faster-transferring, better-interfaced thing to get cheaper. Seth: Our combined collection is 40GB; I'd guess my share is less than 30GB of that, and there's a bunch of that I can take or leave... 20GB should be plenty of room for 98% of the things I'd want to listen to on the spur of the moment. If not, I can swap out the remaining bits fairly quickly (or just go home to the big big drive). As far as the interface, my understanding from reviews and from a little bit of direct experimentation is that the iPod interface is pretty nice as these things go, especially its integration with playlists you make in iTunes...
      ...posted by Steve on January 17, 2002 8:51 PM

Grrr. I wish I'd known this before I bought the iPod yesterday...
      ...posted by Kris on January 18, 2002 9:35 PM

Count on Apple to keep the price point stable -- if they bring out a 20G iPod, they'll drop the 5G model (rather than establish a new price point for a "value" model), and it will cost about what the 5G model used to cost. Although there have been some counter-examples of this in the Apple product line, I think that most of the pricing history supports this type of move. The only way they'd come out with a cheaper iPod would be if they could find some additional way to differentiate it from the more expensive one -- storage alone is not enough, I'll guess. (But I could be wrong...)
      ...posted by Pete on January 23, 2002 5:35 PM

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