"Unfortunately there's no word yet on the read/write speeds on the disks, which is rather important."

Unfortunately there's no price info, either.

25mm wide, 4mm thick and 133.5mm long = 1.63985169 × 10-12 cubic furlongs

Absolutely. I also think we should consider the DFOP as the standard El Reg unit of data storage capacity. Directories Full Of Pr0n makes it easy to visualise how useful these things will be in the real world.

All you need to do is plug it into your computer. PATA (old style IDE, not SATA). The connecter is small, smaller than a standard laptop IDE connection, and Compact Flash cards have a socket (standard hard drives have pins - the socket is on the cable), so you need to buy an adapter. But since it's just a wiring adapeter, you're looking at 5 0/0 plus postage.

The Compact Flash card I am using as a boot drive in my computer is not ultra dma 166, so it's not the fasted IDE drive in world, but the seek time is very good. CF cards come in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB versions in all shops. 0.5 and 8GB are also available

You used to have to format your CF card when you first put it in your camera, but now a CF card typically comes with a FAT file system installed.

Not big enough and probably costs too much and by sound of it not as fast as we would want for the money. I want one of these when they are comparable to disk drives *THEN* I will buy one.

"Not big enough and probably costs too much and by sound of it not as fast as

we would want for the money. I want one of these when they are comparable

to disk drives *THEN* I will buy one."

Gee and I was hoping it would be free. Really, it will not be all that long. The curves will cross soon - unless the disc drive companies come out with all new technology. (Yes, I know that there is hype that this is coming....)

I suspect these devices will remain a solution in search of a problem in the PC world - maybe some utility in media players, camera and crossover devices, but nothing more.

They might find some utility in PC's - when they have better data access rates than the latest SATA drives - thinking of pagefiles on a slower drive than existing here, what a performance boost!

The noise/physical size/power advantages look interesting, especially in space limited applications. I wonder what the heat output is like though?

Not to mention price...

Still, I'm easily satisfied - all I'm looking for is something about this physical size, low power consumption, low heat output, low noise, around 120Gb, faster than a WD Raptor (Hey! It's solid state - isn't silicon supposedly faster than a HD? If not, why bother with RAM?) and with a cost advantage over spinning metal.

So, it ticks a few of the boxes. But not enough, not as yet.

Must try harder...

I wish people would stop using the phrase "Form Factor" when referring to an item's shape.

Who put the word 'factor' after the word 'form' and then decided it was a new and trendy way to say and write 'shape'? I want that person caught and shot (if that's not too much to ask).

Precisely what decision or outcome was the item's form a factor in? None!

We almost never talk about price factor, weight factor, battery-life factor, speed factor, capacity factor, etc. but any of those things might be a factor in a person's decision to buy an item. Otherwise they are just attributes.

This rather daft phrase seems to be limited to the IT industry at the moment but I wonder how long it will be before we'll be discussing Paris Hilton's form factor.

'form factor' term was coined by a historic industry trend for sizes based based around platter diameters, and now governed by a committee of industry members called the small form factor committee.

So you'd like it to be smaller, faster, lower power, cheaper, and capable of making a decent cuppa.... Not asking for much are you.

It costs more and will do for some time, but that's balanced by higher speed (well it should be), lower power, damage resistant and completely silent.

I'd pay a premium for that in my laptop, and the capacities will be sufficient soon.

In fact, i'd probably pay for it for my desktop as well. I currently have an 80Gb raptor, which is about the only noise producing component in the system. If it's faster and silent then it's worth the premium.

If you need more storage space then you need to think about moving your data off your pc and onto your NAS.