Toshiba is going big with its smallest hard drives.
The company on Sept. 1 unveiled its MKxx65GSX 2.5-inch lineup of 2.5-inch hard disk drives that provide as much as 640GB of capacity. The 5,400-rpm HDDs are aimed at an array of computing models, including all-in-one desktops and highly energy-efficient PCs, according to Toshiba officials.
The HDDs can be used by consumers or businesses that need capacity but want to save on power consumption, according to Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing at Toshiba’s Storage Device Division.
“These new high-capacity 2.5-inch HDDs provide benefits for both notebook and desktop applications,” Brzeski said in a statement. “Not only do they continue to close the performance gap between notebooks and desktops, they also provide a perfect alternative to 3.5-inch HDDs in desktop and POS [point of service] applications requiring energy efficiency and reliability in a smaller footprint.”
For a lot of the targeted computing models-including PCs that are compliant with the federal Energy Star energy-efficiency standards, surveillance systems and digital recorders-businesses and customers needed to use 3.5-inch hard drives to get the storage capacity they needed.
Toshiba’s MKxx65GSX hard drive series can reduce power consumption and heat dissipation by up to 80 percent compared with 3.5-inch drives with equal capacity, according to Toshiba officials.
The series’ hard drive with the largest capacity-at 640GB-can hold up to 182,000 digital photos, 168,000 digital music files or 520 downloaded digital movies of high-definition video, Toshiba said.
The new hard drives are scheduled to ship to PC manufacturers and distributors in the fourth quarter.