Toshiba launches super hard drive

The technology is so specialist it will only be available to system builders

In its endless quest to feed the all-consuming beast of laptop storage demand, Toshiba has launched a new high-capacity, lightweight hard disk drive for notebooks.

Multi-media, games and high-end application have all created an insatiable appetite for gigabytes among mobile users, said Toshiba’s marketing manager Dean Edwards, and the most cost-effective way to feed this monster is through hard-disk drives (HDDs).

The 1.8in HDD technology runs at 5,400rpm. It can store 250GB, giving it a density of 378.8GB/inch2.
The challenge was to create high capacity without neutralising the portability that Toshiba’s system building clients need to achieve for their notebook ranges.

The technology is so specialist it will only be available to Toshiba’s system builder clients and OEM partners, promised Edwards.

Market analyst IDC recently reported that sales of notebooks and ultra-portables are still the fastest-growing sector of the computing market.

Second quarter 2008 sales for notebooks in Europe were up 60 per cent compared with the same period last year.
While some growth has been driven by the popularity of sub-notebooks, it is mostly driven by a desire for vast media and data libraries among mobile users.

“Whether you are playing a game, watching a corporate video on YouTube, or just plain gene splicing, a mobile user needs masses of storage. It has to be vast, and it has to be fast,” said Rob Heath, mobile technology product manager at laptop maker Stone Computers.

Forget all the hype about solid-state disk technology, old-fashioned hard disks still do the business, argued Edwards. Solid state may be fast, he said, but HDD continues to evolve.

“The average seek time of this technology is 15ms,” he said. “How quickly do you need to retrieve your information?”