Cornice announced the 5th generation of small form factor hard drives. This new offering adds a 12 gigabyte (GB) capacity point to the existing one inch Dragon product line. It will allow OEMs to offer thinner and higher-capacity consumer electronics (CE) devices while featuring industry-leading robustness, durability, and low power requirements for everyday consumer use. Mobile phones, portable media players, gaming devices and personal storage devices will be able to store more information than ever before.

Cornice's unique mobile storage architecture was designed from the ground up with special focus on CE device needs. By focusing exclusively on components for the CE market, Cornice has created a streamlined drive solution specifically for mobile, pocket-able applications while maintaining the features and quality required for a robust hard drive.

"As the digital content infrastructure evolves and becomes more accessible, consumers continue to demonstrate an insatiable appetite for music, video, and TV clips." said Camillo Martino, Cornice’s president and chief executive officer. "This explosion in digital content is creating an incredible market opportunity for storage in portable entertainment as end users seek to go mobile."

The new Dragon series drives are protected by Cornice's ruggedness design, Crash GuardTM, and can withstand excessive shaking, extreme drops, and other abuse without skipping, stopping, or crashing.

Crash Guard consists of:

• Active Latch: When dropped, the most common damage to a hard drive occurs when the head scrapes across the surface of the disk (not unlike the needle scratching across an old vinyl LP record when the turntable was bumped). Cornice securely locks the head in place with an active latch mechanism.
• Skip Control: Hard drives are going places they have never been before–jogging, 4-wheel driving, skydiving–and are expected to operate even with excessive and repetitive motion. Cornice designed the Dragon series drives from the ground up to withstand the most extreme conditions while providing continuous playback without skipping or restarting.
• Drop Safe: This feature in the Crash Guard family allows the drive to actually sense being dropped. This means that even if the drive is in the middle of reading or writing data to the disk, it can immediately react and place the head safety under the active latch well before the unit actually strikes the ground.

The Dragon Series drive is available in volume quantities in Q3. List price is $85 per unit in quantities of 10,000 per year.