Techniques for Integrating Mini-Disk Drive Technology into Embedded Applications

This white paper explores the integration of Hard Disk Dive (HDD) technology into embedded applications, with a focus on consumer electronics. This paper discusses system performance relative to CPU utilization and HDD datapath management, system power relative to performance of HDD access, common interfacing requirements for some of the current HDD products, different system architecture implementations for connecting mini-disk drives to some of today's prevalent low power embedded microprocessors, and trade-offs that need to be considered for a given application.