Density also will increase, Magenis said. Along with stripping out parts, the company has worked on engineering issues such as keeping energy consumption down. The RCA device will be able to run 12 hours on a single battery charge because the drive's motor shuts down between tasks, Magenis said. Shock-absorbing materials in the drive case will allow devices to sustain the shock from a 1-meter drop, he added. Although a start-up, Cornice has been able to establish at least some credibility early on with large manufacturers -- in part because of its pedigree, said In-Stat/MDR's Wolf. Engineers and executives from Maxtor, Seagate, Quantum and other hard-drive makers largely staff the company. Magenis, for instance, was a vice president of engineering at Maxtor. Cornice's chief technology officer, Curt Bruner, served as chief electronics architect at Quantum. Some of Cornice's employees came from Dataplay, a once-promising minidisc start-up. Established manufacturers also are helping the company. Texas Instruments manufactures silicon for the SE, while the platters are made by Hoya, which manufacturers the small, thin disks for a number of companies. The drives are assembled in a factory owned by SAE, a subsidiary of Japan's TDK. "Fundamentally, SAE is carrying our working capital," Magenis said. Venture investors include Nokia, CIBC World Markets and Texas Instruments. Competitors are pursuing the market as well. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which took over IBM's hard-drive division, is coming out with a line of 1.8-inch drives this year. Currently, only Toshiba markets 1.8-inch drives, and one of the few products that contain the drive is the iPod. The sparseness of finished products containing these sort of drives will change soon, said Bill Healy, general manager of the mobile business unit at Hitachi. Hitachi will come out with a 4GB Microdrive before the end of the year. Flash memory cards, which now hold 1GB of data, meanwhile, will continue to boost density. Magenis, though, claims it will be tough to beat Cornice on price. The industry is moving away from flash and toward hard drives for storage, and coming up with a minimalist hard drive takes time. "It took us almost three years to do this," he said. "Anyone else is literally looking at at least two years."
Everybody needs storage. And almost every week some company manages to squeeze more storage into less space for a lower price. For the latest news, reviews and price checks on everything from USB flash cards and PCCard hard disks to storage area networks, see ZDNet UK's Storage News Section.
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