Toshiba Raises 1.8-Inch Hard Disk Drive Capacity to 10GB
March 28, 2001 (TOKYO) -- Toshiba Corp. plans to start shipments of its new 1.8-inch, 10GB hard disk drive in April.
The company has succeeded in raising the capacity of its current hard disk drives of only 2GB by five times in one stretch.
The capacity per hard disk is 5GB. The company realized production of a 10GB hard drive by building two hard disks of the same type in an 8mm-thick case. It also intends to provide 5GB hard drives with a height of 5mm.
Toshiba seems to have assumed that the current hard drives could be built into Type II PC card slots. However, the company aims for the new hard drives to be built into small PCs and PDAs.
Toshiba also seems to have speculated that marketing built-in hard drives will put give it an advantage in activating the 1.8-inch hard drive market, which has not yet expanded. Currently, Toshiba is the only big hard drive maker selling a 1.8-inch model, but other makers aim to make inroads in the market, including Hitachi Ltd.
Although some venture companies commercialized 1.8-inch hard disk drives around 1991, the market did not ramp up, and almost all of them withdrew. At that time ,it was mainly intended for PDAs and small-sized PCs, for which 2.5-inch hard drives were supposed to be unsuitable. But the market did not grow as the companies had expected, and the price of the drives did not fall.
In the new hard drives, Toshiba has succeeded in reducing the current size of 54mm wide by 85.6mm deep to 54mm wide by 78.5mm deep so they can be built in easily. Their power voltage is +3.3V each, and their power consumption is 1.3W at Read/Write and 0.5W at low power idle. Their shock resistance is 200G when operating, and 1,000G when not operating. Their interface is an ATA. The data transfer rate between them and their host computer is a maximum of 66.7MB per second. Their rotational speed is 4,200rpm, and their average seek time 15ms. They have a buffer memory of 1,024KB built in.
(Nikkei Electronics)
