Ranma13

In response to the person who said even if the head touches the MD it'll just scratch it: MDs use lasers, not magnetic heads like in hard drives. In order for the laser assembly to touch the MD, it would have to break off from the base and fly straight up. In other words, you'd have to almost run over the MD player for that to happen. In response to the post about dropping HDs instantly or inevitably killing them: I know people who have iPods and have dropped them several times on hard ground and they have survived the impact. Apple and other portable HD players have enough engineering background that they can minimize the shock to the HD. Of course, a MD player is still much more durable than an iPod, but HD based players aren't as prone to shock as people believe them to be.

That's a little over 8 minutes for 219MB. Might be a bit too slow for big files but should be fine for some MP3 transfers here and there. I really wonder when Sony is going to realize that ATRAC3 will never become a standard and just start making MD players play MP3 files. If they did, I bet MD players could even outbeat the iPod.

That's fine, when I said I wanted to use it as a portable hard drive, I meant for data storage only. The transfer speed might be too slow to transfer large files at a time but I usually only work with stuff ranging from 2-10MB so it should be fine.

I'm not really interested in the music aspect of the Hi-MD player but after hearing that it can function as a mass storage device I became extremely interested. After all, for a mere $200 and a $5 Hi-MD, you can have 1 GB of file storage, cheaper than any flash drive out there (size isn't a concern of mine). I was wondering what the data transfer (read/write) speeds are like on the Hi-MD player, does anybody have any numbers or comparisons?