HARD DRIVES
Toshiba sets standard for small
Toshiba has developed what it believes is the smallest functional hard drive for next-generation cell phones and other portable gadgets -- a nickel-sized disk that can store two to three gigabytes of music and video.
At 0.85 inches in diameter, the Toshiba drive would beat a 1-inch model from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi's U.S. unit. But the Hitachi drive stores 4 gigabytes.
More commonly used hard drives, such as the 250-gigabyte ones in digital video recorders, are about 3.5 inches in diameter, Hitachi spokesman Tadashi Hisanaga said.
But demand for tinier drives is growing as manufacturers pack more features into cell phones and other networked gadgets. A 2-gigabyte drive can store about 30 hours of music but cannot store movie-length video.
