Handhelds close to seizing personal storage
Handhelds close to seizing personal storage
Mar 07, 2005: PDAs, mobile phones and other portable devices could soon be handed their own storage interfaces following the publication of a final 1.0 specification at this week's CE-ATA Working Group at the Intel Developer Forum.
Some of the companies involved in creating the new specification for the industry standard interface include Intel, Seagate Technologies, Hitachi Global Storage, Marvell Semiconductor, and Toshiba American Information Systems.
Two demonstrations at the CE-ATA Working Group at the Intel Developer Forum included an Intel handheld media player showing a video from a CE-ATA prototype disk drive.
Another involved a PDA playing a video stored on a Hitachi Travelstar 1.8-inch hard disk drive.
The CE-ATA.org website states that handhelds will benefit from a standardized set of electronics and storage solutions that will provide access to multiple sources at costs more competitive than custom driven designs.
"Through collaborative work enabled by the CE-ATA initiative, small form factor HDD suppliers will be able to arrive at a unified solution that best addresses the needs of customers and integrators who require the capacities and speeds provided by hard disk drives.
"Working in concert with participating companies enables the timely development of storage solutions that have the widest appeal to the handheld and consumer market segments."
Benefits of the CE-ATA standard are expected to be disk drive suppliers, silicon providers, product integrators and consumers.
The Working Group, established six months ago, is comprised of the Promoter, Contributor, and Adopter companies. They are investigating the next steps and follow on feature sets that compliment and fully make use of the capabilities reflected in the initial interface specification.
The products that will support the new technology will be released in the second half of this year.
Related Article: