TAG | Toshiba brings a gargantuan 320GB to portable devices |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 22 August 2007 | |
  
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These ‘other devices’ are quite numerous these days, and beyond notebook PCs and portable hard drives, these drives can or are being used in games consoles, video cameras, mp3 and video players, converged TVs, printers (big office printers usually have a hard drive), small PC based media centers, professional audio/video editing systems, point-of-sale terminals and hard disk based video recorders. Operating at 5400 RPM, the drive uses two 160GB platters to deliver the capacity boost and work reliably, using a Serial ATA interface at a 3.0 Gbps data transfer rate, and is available as an alternate model with a free-fall sensor built-in to protect the heads and the platter if the device containing the drive is suddenly dropped. This particular drive is part of the 5,400 RPM MK-GSX family, and comes in capacities of 80, 120, 160, 250GB and, of course, that whopping 320GB. Naturally much larger drive sizes are planned for 2010 and beyond. But we have to get there first, and you could put two of these in some of today’s desktop replacement notebooks, such as Toshiba’s own Qosmio series of Media Center notebook PC, giving those users 640GB of internal storage before adding any external drives. Toshiba’s have also released the 7,200 RPM MK-GSY line of hard drives, coming in 80GB, 120, 160 and 200GB, giving users who need the fastest drives for mobile multimedia and video editing applications the choice of a 200GB at 7,200 RPM speeds. Toshiba say they’ve been able to bring the larger 320GB 5,400 RPM drive and the 200GB 7,200 RPM drive out faster thanks to the “extensible platform” they’ve built which “incorporates a shared architectural base and common components”, which their US and Japanese teams were able to leverage in the faster development process. This included the development of new head and media (platter) technologies, with Toshiba claiming it has delivered “the fastest native transfer rates yet achieved in mobile 2.5-inch products”, which Toshiba says is “a key factor in overall drive performance”. The line is in addition to Toshiba’s existing 4,200 RPM MK-GSS line which operates at a slower speed to draw less power for the “ultra-power-conservative segment” of ultra portable devices. Toshiba quotes Gartner statistics which say that “2.5-inch mobile-class PATA/SATA-interface HDD shipments worldwide will increase from 112 million in 2006 to more than 280 million in 2011”. John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner is quoted as saying that "The mobile 2.5-inch/9.5mm-Z-height form factor will be servicing a wider and richer variety of applications. Increasing capacities at lower costs, coupled with enhanced performance and reliability metrics, will enable this class of product to further penetrate new consumer markets as well as expanding possibilities for integration in the traditional PC and blade server markets." Given the technological progress being made with all manner of portable digital devices, from the iPhone and other mobile phones to the UMPC, video cameras and portable music/video players, Tablet PCs and notebook computers in general, we’ll still be needing large amounts of personal storage before we can 100% rely on the Internet and our data residing in it to be there, every single time, whenever we need it. It won’t be long before Toshiba figures out how to put two 250GB platters in a 2.5-inch hard drive to release a 500GB 2.5-inch model – it’s not hard to predict that we’ll be seeing this model sometime in 2008, while Toshiba’s competitors Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu and those in the flash business all work on developments and breakthroughs of their own to compete. Whichever way you look at it, we can all be happy that things are looking really, really big for the entire data storage industry! |
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