Cornice introduces Ultra-Thin 8GB and 10GB Micro Hard Drive

Cornice Inc, a Colorado manufacturer, has released the Dragon Series Micro Hard Drive, an incredibly small hard drive with a 10GB capacity.

Company claims that audio/video players, mobile phones and personal storage devices will all be enhanced by the Dragon series micro hard drive, 40% smaller than their predecessor storage elements. The new 8GB and 10GB Cornice Dragon have smaller form factors than ever before. Cornice narrowed the casing around the disk and also reduced the depth of the drive making the overall unit smaller.

The Dragon series drives are protected by the company's design, crash guard, and can withstand excessive shaking, extreme drops, and other abuse without skipping, stopping, or crashing. The crash guard consists of active latch, skip control and drop safe.

By narrowing the casing around the disk and by shrinking the “z” height, Cornice was able to produce the smallest and thinnest drive on the market – a necessity for next generation, high-capacity mobile phones, audio/video players and personal storage devices. The Dragon series drives are 40-percent smaller than its predecessor Storage Elements, as well as current competitive drives.

Cornice’s unique architecture is designed from the ground up and exclusively for CE devices. By focusing only on components required for the CE market, Cornice has created a disk drive solution that is streamlined specifically for these pocket-able products. At 8-gigabytes today, and 10-gigabytes in the near future, Cornice is firmly in the leadership position for storage density. In response to end-user endurance demands, Cornice has decreased the power of Dragon by half, and now represents only five percent of the total battery consumption within a typical MP3 player system.

Durable for an Active Lifestyle

Cornice technology ensures that consumer electronics devices will provide continuous and uninterrupted playback even during today’s most active lifestyles. The new Dragon series drives are protected by Cornice’s ruggedness design, Crash GuardTM, and can withstand excessive shaking, extreme drops, and other abuse without skipping, stopping, or crashing.

Skip Control – Hard drives are going places they have never been before – jogging, 4-wheel driving, skydiving – and are expected to operate even with excessive and repetitive motion. Cornice designed the Dragon series drives from the ground up to withstand the most extreme conditions while providing continuous playback without skipping or restarting.

Drop Safe – This feature in the Crash Guard family allows the drive to actually sense being dropped. This means that even if the drive is in the middle of reading or writing data to the disk, it can immediately react and place the head safety under the active latch well before the unit actually strikes the ground.

The 4.0-gigabyte Cornice Storage Element is protected by Crash Guard™ technology and can withstand excessive shaking motions, numerous drops, and other abuse without skipping, stopping, or crashing, enabling devices that are rugged enough for daily use. Crash Guard consists of the trademarked features of Crash Guard, with the additional capability of the Drop Safe feature.

Drop Safe – The newest feature in the Crash Guard family allows the SE to actually sense being dropped. This means that even if the SE is in the middle of reading or writing data to the disk, it can immediately react and get the head under the safety of the active latch well before the unit actually strikes the ground. Tuned to respond in as little a distance as four inches, the SE simply protects itself from a careless or clumsy user.

Active Latch – When dropped, the most common damage to a hard drive occurs when the head scrapes across the surface of the disk (not unlike the needle scratching across an old vinyl LP record when the turntable was bumped). To prevent this, Cornice not only removes the head from the disk, but also securely locks it in place with an active latch mechanism whenever the drive is not actively seeking data. Since a typical MP3 player is reading the disk less than one minute per hour, this results in added durability and reliability for consumers during accidental drops.

Skip Control – Since hard drives are now being taken places they have never been before – jogging, 4-wheel driving, skydiving – they now have to operate even with extreme and repetitive motion. As it turns out, this is a very difficult task for typical one-inch devices derived from laptop and desktop hard drives. Cornice designed the SE from the ground up to withstand with this kind of active environment. No other solution in the market comes close to Cornice’s skip control technology which enables full-length movies to play without interruption under severe vibration while other solutions interrupt continuous playback with skips, pauses and even restarts.

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