Toshiba to Ship 160GB 1.8-Inch HDDs

Toshiba announced June 11 that it plans to bring to market two 1.8-inch serial ATA hard drives that will ship with a maximum capacity of 160GB—the highest such capacity yet in that disk size.

The 160GB drive and a smaller 80GB drive will enter mass production in August, a company spokesperson said.

Both 1.8-inch drives sport an interface speed of up to 1.5Gbps and feature a rotation speed of 5,400 rpm—1,200 rpm faster than the current generation of Toshiba 1.8-inch 120GB drives.

The 160GB drive is more environmentally friendly than the current 120GB models because it uses about 25 percent less energy as defined under the Japanese legal standard, the spokesperson said.

The drives are also in full compliance with the European Union's RoHS directive, which restricts the use of six banned materials—including lead, mercury and cadmium—in device assembly.

The drive improves the maximum internal data transfer rate by approximately 17 percent and supports faster data access in reading and writing to enhance overall performance.

Analysts have said that the demand for smaller, faster HDDs (hard disk drives) is expected to increase as demand for UMPCs (Ultra Mobile Personal Computers) and handheld devices also increases.

Spinning disk drive-making companies are beginning to experience a major market-share battle with solid-state drives made of NAND flash in laptops, cell phones and connected handheld devices.

Each of the major HDD makers—Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, and Western Digital—makes both kinds of drives. But the competition will get fierce in the OEM market, as server and desktop-computer makers, such as Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Dell, Hitachi Data Systems, and Sun Microsystems start moving off spinning disks and onto SSDs (solid-state drives) in the next few years.

Samsung and Western Digital are also expected to announce their own, newly improved 1.8-inch HDDs soon.