Toshiba has had a busy ol' month as far as storage is concerned. It started off by launching a 2.5in drive offering 640GB of storage back on September 2nd, and followed up a week later with the introduction of the industry's largest single-platter 1.8in hard drive.
Turns out the Japanese had yet another ace up its sleeve in the form of a new family of high-performance MKxx56GSY-series 7,200rpm 2.5in drives. The range, launched last week, includes a line-topping 500GB model and promises to deliver "more than a 13 per cent performance improvement in disk operations compared to Toshiba's previous 7,200rpm family".
Designed for commercial and consumer notebooks, as well as all-in-one desktops, the drives measure 69.85mm x 100.0mm x 9.5mm and offer an average seek time of 11ms. Toshiba's 500GB drive features two 250GB platters with an areal density of 395 Gb/in2.
Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing at Toshiba Storage Device Division, commented on the launch with the following statement:
"This new family delivers faster overall system performance, which boosts user productivity - a key differentiator that PC manufacturers can provide to commercial and consumer notebook users. As a result, we expect that 7,200 RPM HDDs will grow to more than 25 per cent of 2.5in HDD shipments within two years. In addition to the half-terabyte capacity, decreased environmental impact and low power consumption are also benefits, demonstrating Toshiba's continued leadership in delivering the right solutions to meet emerging market needs."
The MKxx56GSY-series 7,200rpm 2.5in hard drives were shipped to PC manufacturers in limited quantities during the third quarter. Toshiba expects to enter volume production in Q4.
