Everyone who's anyone wants to get their hardware into those hugely-popular netbooks. S3 Graphics took its Chrome 400 series GPUs on a slim-fast diet yesterday and presented the ULP series - ideal for the ultra-portable, it said.
Today, it's Toshiba's turn. The Japan-based manufacturer has launched a super-slim 1.8in hard-disk drive at capacities of up to 250GB - that's the largest capacity available in a 1.8in drive, it says. The device, pictured below, operates at 5,400rpm and its small-form factor hopes to "meet growing demand for high-capacity mobile computing".
In other words, Toshiba wants to get it in all those hot-selling netbooks. And why not? It has all the right ingredients, and it'll no doubt be a whole lot cheaper for OEMs than the solid-state alternative.
The dual-platter 250GB drive is joined by a dual-platter 160GB offering and a single-platter 120GB version. All drives provide an average seek time of 15 milliseconds, measure 54.0mm x 78.5mm x 8.0mm and weigh up to 62 grammes.
Martin Larsson, vice president and general manager of Toshiba's Europe storage device division, said:
The race towards ultra-portability has been a consumer-led challenge to component and laptop manufacturers that has resulted in a flowering of innovation. Recent developments also mean that these are fascinating times in the storage device sector, as debate continues into whether HDD or Solid State Drives (SSD) are the best technology to employ in such devices.
While SSD is a promising technology, the fact remains that HDD will continue to offer manufacturers significant advantages in the medium term. For devices with high storage capacity requirements it is still considerably more cost-effective to deploy HDD. Furthermore, the level of innovation which companies such as Toshiba have been able to apply to the technology means that the latest generation of 1.8-inch hard disk drives are light and fast enough to find a home in the most fashionable notebooks.
Mass production is scheduled for November 2008, so we can expect these to show up in netbooks and notebooks shortly after.
Official press release: TOSHIBA LAUNCHES NEW 1.8-INCH HDDS TO SUPPORT GROWTH OF ULTRA-MOBILE COMPUTING
