Thursday, January 08, 2004
Toshiba Readies Truly Tiny Hard Drive
Toshiba has unveiled a prototype hard drive that's smaller than any currently on the market. The drive could start appearing in devices such as cellular telephones and digital music players before the end of this year.
The drive is the same length and width as an SD memory card and is 1 millimeter thicker, says Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing at Toshiba's U.S. storage media division.
A prototype on display at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week has a data storage capacity of 2GB. Toshiba is also planning to produce a sample drive with 4GB capacity around the middle of this year, Brzeski says.
The device itself is a miniaturized version of the kind of drive found inside a personal computer. It features a recording platter, the media part of the hard drive on which data is stored, that measures 0.85 inches in diameter.
Most current desktop computers use drives with a 3.5-inch-diameter platter, while notebook computers usually use 2.5-inch drives. Even smaller drives are used in digital music players--Apple Computer's IPod and IPod mini use 1.8-inch and 1.0-inch drives, respectively--but until now no company has unveiled a smaller device. Full Article>>>
The drive is the same length and width as an SD memory card and is 1 millimeter thicker, says Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing at Toshiba's U.S. storage media division.
A prototype on display at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week has a data storage capacity of 2GB. Toshiba is also planning to produce a sample drive with 4GB capacity around the middle of this year, Brzeski says.
The device itself is a miniaturized version of the kind of drive found inside a personal computer. It features a recording platter, the media part of the hard drive on which data is stored, that measures 0.85 inches in diameter.
Most current desktop computers use drives with a 3.5-inch-diameter platter, while notebook computers usually use 2.5-inch drives. Even smaller drives are used in digital music players--Apple Computer's IPod and IPod mini use 1.8-inch and 1.0-inch drives, respectively--but until now no company has unveiled a smaller device. Full Article>>>
