Just when one thought 60GB is getting rather insane for an MP3-only player, Toshiba has unveiled a higher capacity 80GB 1.8" hard drive. They expect to start shipping this version in the 3rd quarter of 2005. As Toshiba is Apple's main hard drive supplier for its iPod series, this will likely be put to use in an 80GB iPod in the future. Toshiba also plans on shipping a 0.5cm thick 40GB 1.8" version in the 2nd quarter of 2005 to allow for slimmer portable devices compared with using the current 0.8cm thick 1.8" drives.
Performance wise, both upcoming versions have a 4200rpm spindle, average seek time of 15ms and connect via its UDMA 100 interface. As these hard drives are intended to be used in devices that are subject to jogging, bumping or even a fall, these drives can handle up to 500G of shock operating (<2.5 foot fall while spinning) and 1500G of shock non-operating (<7.5 foot fall while off). GristyMcFisty used our news submit to let us know about the following news:
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Both drives spin at 4200rpm, offer an average seek time of 15ms and operate across an Ultra DMA 100 interface. They can take 500G operating shock and 1500G non-operating shock. Toshiba claimed the drives mark the first ever use of a perpendicular recording system in which the tiny magnetic domains used to store each bit of information are aligned at right-angles to the plane of the disk, not parallel to it, as is traditionally the case with HDD platters. The upshot, said Toshiba, is a far greater data density - 206Mb per square millimetre - than anyone has been able to achieve so far in a drive of this class.
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I don't think many consumers would have enough music to fill one of these, but if Apple comes up with a video iPod these drives would be ideal. On the other hand, even if only Apple's photo iPod series takes these on, they would work well as a high capacity very compact portable drive since the iPod works by USB2, Firewire and appears on the PC through a drive letter.
Another good use for these drives would be for PDA's to give a good combination of a portable hand-held PC and a multimedia player. While most PDA's to date are more than capable of handling video playback, users are stuck resorting to expensive high capacity flash cards.
Source: The Register
