Cornice Inc., which has designed a stripped-down, compact 1.0-inch disk drive for consumer applications, said Monday that it will soon begin shipping a larger 2GB drive.
The Cornice Storage Element eliminates many of the components needed for more conventional hard disk drives used in laptops and in desktop PCs, such as RAM and ROM memory and dedicated connectors. The company unveiled the 1.5GB version in June of last year.
Cornice, based in Longmont, Colo., will be unveiling the new drive at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The Rio Nitrus, Creative Labs MuVo2 and iRiver IGP-100 MP3 players have already been built around 1.5GB Cornice drive; other products built around the Cornice drive include the Samsung ITCAM-9 (an MPEG-4-based miniature camcorder) and the MPIO HS100 1.5GB USB portable drive from Korean manufacturer Digitalway.
“With the highly successful introduction of Cornices Storage Element in June of last year, it was evident that our company and its technology struck a chord within the consumer electronics community—that reliable, low-cost, high-capacity data storage within very small electronic devices was a near-term, achievable reality,” said Kevin Magenis, president and CEO of Cornice, in a statement. “The debut of this two-gigabyte device demonstrates that we are committed to supplying our customers with increasingly high storage capacities at an extremely competitive price.”
Cornice said that the new 2GB Storage Element is shipping in volume to OEMs, meaning that products will show up on the market early next year. The company has listed the drive at $70 in lots of 100,000 pieces.