The future notebook

Thinking about the hard drive being a wearable computer gave me some ideas about what it could do.

• Modify the IDE connection to create virtual drives for a device.
• Contain the design for the hard drive itself.
• Be connected to a rapid prototyping machine to create devices from the designs on the drive.
• Be used as a regular hard drive.
• Separate shared and unshared files.

To create devices or managing interfaces, all you have to go through is the ATA-5 documentation. d1321r3 ATA/ATAPI-5 revision 3 (final draft) [pdf] on T13 Technical Committee's site should be enough, but to get the published copy you have to buy it from ANSI.

You can connect devices directly to the drive, but to have more than one device connected you have to have a managing interface to allow the device to be shared. Usually, this is the job of the operating system, but to have an operating system you would need a generic processor. Devices already have processors that are better. The interface would act like an exokernel. Knowing that an IDE-to-USB adapter exists, I have thought that existing devices could be used if an adapter could be created. Adding a 40 Gb hard drive to a Nintendo DS. The Nintendo DS would need more intructions because the applications (games) are on the external media. Also, there may be an internal limit to external media. How about an IDE-to-SD adapter.

There is also very little start up and slow down time for hard drives compared to a computer boot up. With a hotplug interface you could change devices almost instantly.