Smaller than a credit card, this record-breaking hard drive will no doubt soon find its way in a portable media play near you.
Toshiba has just unleashed upon the mortal consumer world a
1.8-inch hard drive with a capacity of 100GB. Toshiba says its memorably named 'MK1011GAH' is a world-first.
The Gah might not amount to much at first glance, but consider its weight and weep. This drive is a mere 59 grams. A slice of cheese is heavier than that, although it's tastier, so the cheese wins.
The 1.8-inch hard drive measures, using the less archaic metric system, 7.1cm by 5.4cm with a thickness of merely 8mm. Inside this tiny area rest four read-write heads and two platters that spin at 4,200rpm.
The tiny Gah can pack so much information in so little space because it uses the new perpendicular recording manner of storing magnetic data on the platters -- as opposed to the aging longitudinal method.
A nifty side-effect to using perpendicular recording is the reduced power usage due to the more dense data storage. The read-write heads of such higher capacity drives need not move as much at the same platter spin speed, as the data is closer together. This also sees a negligible increase in data access speeds.
Spinning up, the Gah sips 1.8 watts, using 1 meagre watt when reading and writing. A comparable 2.5-inch
100GB hard drive from Toshiba uses 4.5 watts to spin up, reading and writing with 2 watts.
As this little dust mite uses the ATA-7 interface, you can't just jack the Gah into any old PC. If you have SATA, however, and can safely secure a 1.8-inch drive somewhere, it wouldn't be too challenging, as its interface is based on the first generation of SATA.
With data storage needs growing ever-insatiable alongside low-power requirements, it's great to see more standard-size 2.5" notebook drives increasing to
more respectable 250GB capacity.
Finally, I can demand a 100GB mobile phone.