Large Capacity Hi-md Disks (> 2gb)

[1kyle]

For fairly simple reasons I don't think these are going to appear any time soon --- The current HI-MD units have the basic FAT16 file system (Old DOS and early Windows) which gives you a maximum file system size of 2GB (that's the maximum for the entire directory and files in it)

Here's the Official explanation from Microsoft

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/118335/EN-US/

To get larger than this you would need the file system to be written in FAT32 or NTFS (assuming Windows computers which depressingly still around 85% are.

If the units were 5GB capable the entire internal hardware / firmware of the new units would have to be re-designed --and having just come out with HI-MD I don't think Sony would alter it again in such a short time.

Besides even at HI-SP you can get nearly 8 hours of music / 7-8 CD's in quite decent quality anyway which is probably enough for 1 Disc. What's wrong with carrying around 2 or 3 disks.

The new Hard Disk devices aren't as flexible, you have to re-record your music if you buy a new device / it gets broken and I'm not even sure you can copy in anything other than real time so a big pain in the butt,

With the 1GB units --if you buy a new recorder your old discs will still work.

Re-arranging music on these Hard disk players is also not as easy as you think.

I for one am quite happy with the 1GB size --It's enough to be useful and not TOO much as to be cumbersome.

Cheers

-K

[BobS]

Good observation. I believe the FAT system is why ATRAC is written in one large file.

One of the characteristics of the is that space is allocated by clusters. On a 1 Gig disc the clusters are 32K. A 1K file takes up 32K. A 33K file takes up 64K. On average each file wastes 16K.

If you had 300 files on a disc, wasted space would be 4.8 Meg. By putting all the tracks in 1 file, you can never waste more than part of one cluster.

It also allows Sony to tell just how much recording time is left. If each track were seperate, remaining time would vary depending on how many files were used, how short they were and how much wasted space (cluster slack) they had.

This will show up when using MP3s on MDs. The total amount of time, at the same bit rate, will be less with all those MP3 than with ATRAC.

[Christopher]

With the 1GB units --if you buy a new recorder your old discs will still work.

Yep, but don't count on the existing units to be compatible with higher densities. This generation of Hi-MD is like legacy support; moving everyone in to the Hi-MD format before completely dissolving NetMD/etc completely.

[Guest tony wong]

Yep, but don't count on the existing units to be compatible with higher densities. This generation of Hi-MD is like legacy support; moving everyone in to the Hi-MD format before completely dissolving NetMD/etc completely.

←

haha, u always leave me hints in ur replies..

does u ever mean....

the next gen Hi-MD(which is not 1G in size) will not be backward compatible with existing MD ?

[Michael1980]

Let's just hope Minidisc makes it past THIS revision before thinking about the next.