Credit Card-Size Hard Drive Can Hold 5GB

"Take a look at one of those credit cards in your wallet. That's the exact size and thickness of an upcoming, revolutionary removable storage device called StorCard.

Created by a company with the same name, StorCard can contain from 100MB to more than 5GB of data on a plastic card. At first glance, it looks like a credit card, and even has a magnetic strip like a credit card, for potential use in standard credit card readers.

The hard disk data, however, is accessed on a tiny spinning disk inside the thin card....

A spinning wheel made of Mylar is engaged when the card is inserted into a StorReader, a USB-connected drive or PC Card that reads and writes to the StorCard. The reader is expected to retail for under $100 and the cards for under $15 each, Heil says.

The StorCard and StorReader are scheduled to become available in the second half of 2003. The company is talking with media producers, and a partnership announcement with a widely recognized producer of blank media is expected in the next month, Heil says.

Amazingly, within the card is an on-board processor containing integrated software controls that can encrypt data securely in real time....

StorCard promises the tiny hard drive will provide high performance to quickly handle large amounts of data. It will support a volume sufficient to stream media files, for example, according to Heil. As a result, the StorCard could store even material that previously would fit only on a DVD." [PC World]

This gives "trading cards" a whole new meaning! And you thought the iPod was slim! I sure hope that's USB 2.0....

PCWorld on the ever-proliferating number of ways you can wirelessly connect your stereo to your computer so you can listen to the MP3s trapped within.
Read

"It's a digital camera, and an MP3 player, and a digital voice recorder, but what is really cool about new SV-AV10 from Panasonic is that it's also camcorder that records video directly as MPEG-4 files and stores it on SecureDigital memory cards. Plus it's tiny: just 1.1" x 1.97" x 3.43".
Read" [Gizmodo]

Onkyo's New Digital Music Server

"Speaking of connecting the PC to the stereo, the Integra NAS-2.3 from Onkyo has an Ethernet port and an embedded 80GB hard drive so it can both stream music off of your PC, or act as a digital music server in its own right. It can support up to 12 simultaneous streams, so people in different parts of the house can listen to different songs stored on the same box. And for the geeks, it runs on Linux." [Gizmodo]