Digital Trends

Types of Storage

Perhaps one of the biggest questions to ask yourself when buying a digital audio player is what type of storage option you wish to have. The two options currently available are hard-drive units and flash storage players. Each has distinct advantages and disadvantages you'll want to consider.

Hard drive units, by far the larger of the two in terms of storage capability, can currently hold a maximum of 60 GB of music, which can end up being anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 songs depending upon the compression you saved the music to when you ripped it from a CD. Hard drive units, to offset this greater storage capability, tend to be slightly larger then their flash storage brethren and also suck up battery life faster as well.

Since hard drives have moving parts, the hard drive-based players are not always suitable if you plan to use them while jogging or moving around a lot. Most feature a cache which stores music in solid-state memory, but a continuous bouncing motion can damage a hard drive for good. However, many people use hard drive-based players, such as the Apple iPod, while jogging without experiencing any problems.

There are several sizes of hard drives currently being used in digital audio players. Some players are based on 2.5-inch drives, typically used for notebook computers. But hard drives are getting smaller and smaller and digital audio devices are prime candidates for the smaller form factor drives. Several units now use 1.8-inch drives built by GS MagicStor and Hitachi and others utilize a 1-inch drive built by Toshiba and Cornice. Toshiba has recently announced a .85-inch drive that will soon store up to 4GB of data.

The smaller hard drives can withstand more shock than the 2.5-inch drives and as devices get smaller and smaller and capacities increase, players based on these tiny drives will become more the norm.

Flash storage players, while not quite capable of carrying your entire CD collection like the hard drive models can, still can make quite a dent. Maximum built-in storage for flash-based players generally runs up to 512 MB. To add to this however, many flash-based players are easily upgradeable, allowing you to increase storage capacity when larger flash cards are available and more affordable.
 
Flash players are fairly compact and are more portable as they weigh less. A lighter weight allows you to strap the player on your arm while at the gym and not feel like you are carrying a brick.

Several manufacturers offer tiny hard drive based storage solutions. (Images not to scale)