Storage Toolkit

Cornice shrinks its portable drives

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Cornice

Published: 03 Jan 2006 10:20 GMT

Cornice's newest line of portable drives boosts memory while shrinking in size.

The hard-drive maker will show off what it calls the market's smallest hard drive at the Consumer Electronics Show, the company said on Monday.

Upgrades to Cornice's Dragon series feature 8GB and 10GB of storage, up from 4GB and 6GB, and have slimmed down to the size of a book of matches, the company said.

This will offer electronics manufacturers the opportunity to make smaller digital music players, video-equipped handhelds and cell phones that come equipped with more memory, according to Cornice executives. Cornice plans to debut the new drives at CES later this week.

"The Dragon series micro hard drive is Cornice's answer to our customers' needs...and a result of focusing our storage solutions for portable consumer electronics," said Camillo Martino, Cornice's chief executive.

Click here to see a picture of Cornice's drive.

Hard-drive makers are in a race with flash-memory technology to fit more memory into smaller devices. Cornice says that its product can retail for about $18.50 per gigabyte, significantly cheaper than flash. In chopping the size of the hard drives by 40 percent, Cornice says that it now has the smallest drives on the market.

Privately held Cornice also announced that it has developed a new USB stick to hold the new drive.

In other news, Cornice said that Samsung has included the 3GB Storage Element (SE) in the production of its SGH-i300 embedded music smart phone, which went on sale in Europe in November.