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Eight companies, among them some of the largest names in Japan's electronics industry, have formed a consortium to promote and license a new removable hard disk system for use in personal computers and consumer electronics devices.

The IVDR, or Information Versatile Disk for Removable usage consortium, was established by Canon, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Phoenix Technologies, Pioneer, Sanyo Electric, Sharp, and Victor of Japan, along with support from electronics connector maker FCI Japan and computer peripherals maker Mitsumi Electric.

IVDR disks are little more than conventional 2.5-inch hard disk drives of the type commonly found in notebook computers, and increasingly in consumer electronics products such as digital video recorders and some digital music players. To the conventional drive, the consortium members have added a new connector, better suited to such a removable system, and also a plastic case to protect the drive.

Led by Sanyo, which first considered such a system 2 years ago, the consortium members began discussing removable hard disk drives as a solution to an ever more common problem: as hard disk drive technology continues increasing, maximum drive capacity is roughly doubling each year which means that consumers who buy a product designed to last several years will very soon be left behind by drive technology.

Solving the Problem

The answer, the group says, is a hot-swappable removable disk that consumers can upgrade as needed. In addition, tying the system to personal computers should enable easier integration of digital images, audio, and video between computer and consumer electronics platforms.

With Wednesday's announcement, the group said they are still working towards version 1.0 of the standard but hope to have it completed within six months. Once the first edition of the standard is complete, it will be released to licensees and companies will be able to begin producing products featuring the technology. None of the eight companies would commit to when they might release their first products, although the consortium's goal is to see IVDR in the shops by the end of the year.

The consortium is still in talks with Sony, Toshiba, and IBM on the technology, says a spokesperson for Sanyo, and there is a wish among the group to make it an internationally used system.

In addition to development of the physical drive format, the group has also worked out an interface specification, based on the standard ATA interface but with extensions for security and audiovisual functions, and a file system.

Cost Concerns

As for cost, the group expects IVDR drives to retail for around 10 percent to 20 percent more than a PC hard disk drive, says Hiroshi Nishida, an engineering manager at Hitachi's hard disk drive engineering support group.

The highest capacity 2.5-inch hard disk drives available now, at around 60 GB, already have six times the capacity of double-sided DVD-RAM disks and exceed the capacity of the Blu-ray optical disc format. Blu-ray was proposed in February by some of the same companies, and is not expected in stores for at least a year.

A small number of prototypes were on display at the Tokyo news conference announcing the consortium's formation. Hitachi has produced a personal computer with an IVDR slot, Sharp was showing a VHS video recorder that included an IVDR slot, Mitsumi had a basic IVDR drive housing, and Sanyo had developed an IVDR-based hard disk drive. Also on display was an IVDR server, which had four slots and could be used as a home server once drives were slotted into the unit.

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