Hitachi Microdrive 3K8

The fundamental design of the hard drive remains unchanged since the 1960s, but smaller = better in the new age.

Miniaturised technology is no longer a surprise, but an expectation. Everything is getting littler, until all consumer electronic will devices eventually disappear in a nano-poof.

Some things, though, have a certain set size that remains constant through the ages. Things like house bricks. And hard drives.

Not any more. Hitachi has announced the world’s smallest hard drive, its 3K8. This wisp of a thing is just 40mm x 30mm and 5mm high. And it weighs, for all practical purposes, nothing. Part of the magic that helped create such a small device was engineering a new connector. The ZIF socket is only a few millimeters long and was designed to enable the drive to be integrated into devices with a minimum footprint.

The 3K8 is designed to be an embedded device. You won’t be able to buy one for your desktop anytime soon, but you will start seeing this drive in mobile phones, cameras, PDAs and the like. It formats to 6 or 8GB, which offers great scope for the usefulness of the devices it will appear in. We can’t help but wish that Sony had tucked one of these into the PSP.

Despite its baby size, the 3K8 retains the functionality of a full-sized drive. Shock protection is inbuilt. The drive will sense it is falling after just 4 inches of gravity assisted travel, and it disengages the drive head to protect the disc. This gives the 3K8 an astounding 2,000G shock tolerance, and an equally amazing 200G even if the shock protection isn’t activated.

The 3K8 is Hitachi’s answer to the increased use of flash memory in devices. Apple’s new 4GB Nano iPod uses flash memory, which is pushing the boundary back for size. Most flash devices do not exceed 1MB because of cost. Hitachi’s drive now allows manufacturers to include comparatively large storage in devices no larger than those designed to use flash memory.