Toshiba’s revamped Portege R600 ultra-portable now sports a whopping 512GB (yes, a half-terrabyte) solid state drive – and an equally jaw-dropping $5,000 price tag.
Take the Portege R600, the already impressive sixth-gen scion of Toshiba’s ultra-compact Portege line which began with the R100 in late 2003.
Prise the current 128GB solid state drive out from between the R600’s matte silver panels and replace it with the 512GB SSD which Toshiba previewed at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
That’s the recipe for the refreshed R600 which arrives next month with a $4,999 sticker (a mere five and a half Rudd bonuses).
The upsized SSD in Toshiba’s lightweight luxe laptop is estimated to squeeze eight hours from its standard issue battery due to a combination of the efficient SSD, parsimonious Core 2 Duo processor (the ultra-low voltage SU9400, which clocks at 1.4GHz and is also part of Intel’s CULV line-up) and a patented Karma Crystal which taps into the Earth’s own magnetic field and plays Enya music while you work. Okay, we’re kidding about the crystal...
You can tell this is a 512GB SSD because, umm, because it says so on the box...
But there’s some serious power-saving smarts sandwiched inside that half-terrabyte SSD module. Toshiba cites a newly developed SSD controller which “enables high-speed parallel processing” to halve power consumption and boost access speeds. The numbers Tosh tossed at us max out at the equivalent of 230MB/sec for reading and 180MB/sec for writing.
Also wedged into this 12.1 inch sub-note is a 3G HSDPA modem, which goes some way to alleviating the sticker shock. Ditto the form factor: a waif-like profile tapering from 2.5cm to 1.9cm which barely nudges the scales at 1kg.