100GB, 9.5mm thick HD from Toshiba

zmcnulty writes "Toshiba has announced their new hard drive today with a 100GB capacity. It's a 2.5 inch drive, is only 9.5mm tall, and supports ATA/100. The (Japanese) Impress Watch article I translated offers a couple more details, though not many. The OEM sample price is about $1,092 USD...but don't ask me what that means for consumers. The previous capacity title was held by IBM with their 80GB Travelstar."

to prevent slashdotting of the english text &

[chrisopherpace]

Toshiba gets over the 80GB mark for laptops with their new hard drive. It's a mere 2.5 inches high, and only 9.5mm thick. Don't ask me why they use both metric and imperial measurements for these though. Seriously, I just had "inch" and "mm" in the same sentence! Toshiba Corporation will begin OEM shipments in May of their 9.5mm thick 2.5 inch HD with a capacity of 100GB, called the "MK1031GAS." With a 35% miniturization of the Femto Slider in the head unit, and an improvement of the thin film technology of the media, a recording density of 124MBit/mm2 has been achieved - making for a larger overall capacity. This is the highest recording density in the world for a 2.5" HD. The disk rotation speed is 4,200rpm, and there are two platter, four heads, and the average seek time is 12msec. The supported interface is Ultra ATA/100. The main body size is 70 x 100 x 9.5mm, and the weight is 99g. Apart from the capacity, however, there have been other improvements to the drive. First of all, the spindle motor rotation control system has been changed, a lower power consumption has been accomplished with the use of a DC/DC converter on the power component, allowing for a decrease of 20% versus previous models. Also, the shock protection is about 1.5x that of previous models, with 325G(2msec) while operating, and 850G(1msec) while not operating. The operational sounds while the drive is idle has also been pushed down to 21dB.


Images available Here [hnsg.net]
and
Here [hnsg.net]

About damned time

[dulinor]

80 GB has been max for far too long. When you throw 50 GB of that at your music, it fills up fast. I haven't seen anything on the speed of the drive, but generally higher-density data at same rpm should be faster throughput which is all that matters.

9.5mm means this will fit in the Powerbooks (and presumably most standard laptops as well) Sign me up for one as soon as they're available to consumers.

Re:You can tell a lot about a man...

[ThomasFlip]

yeah but thats not really that funny

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[Tenebrious1]

Dropping the power consumption by 20% sounds like a win.

Well, it doesn't hurt, but it's not a huge deal. When I'm unplugged and working, the hard drive is sitting idle so lowering power consumption doesn't significantly affect battery life.

Now, having a low power DVD player would be much better, watching movies really sucks the life out of a battery.

Of course, with a 100GB drive, I can finally store a decent number of movies on the drive. Still, it'd be better to store movies in smaller sections, load up to a RAM disk and watch from there instead of keeping the drive spinning.

Re:What this means for consumers

[phr1]

Ehh, no not really, the iPod Mini uses a drive that's more like 1". This 100GB drive is 2.5" 9.5mm thick, which is the standard form factor these days for laptop hard drives. Drives in that form factor have already been available with 80GB for several months, and with 60GB for a while before that, so 100 GB is just another incremental improvement over the previous 80 GB. Anyway, these drives are for laptops including subnotes, and largish audio players like the old Creative jukeboxes. The regular (40GB etc). iPod uses a 1.8" diameter drive which is about half the size of this 2.5" unit, and the mini-iPod's drive is the size of a CF card.

Not the next gen iPod.

[RadRafe]

Nope. This is a 2.5" drive, which is too big. The iPod Mini uses the Microdrive; the white iPod has a 1.8" drive. This drive will fit in neither device. In fact, it's wider than the entire iPod. Of course, over time the iPod will have more and more capacious drives. But this isn't one of them.

Re:You know...

[dfghjk]

You do when you edit video or still photos on them. I generated 40GB of still data on my last trip and have generated up to 110GB on previous trips. RAW files for the highest resolution cameras these days are huge and will continue to get bigger. It's not uncommon to fill up several gigs with of flash at a time.

Re:$100 / GB?

[Derang()]

Um....this thing has a retail price of about 1000 dollars, and it stores roughly 100GB of data.

Last time I checked, $1000 / 100GB = $10/GB

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[swillden]

Of course, with a 100GB drive, I can finally store a decent number of movies on the drive. Still, it'd be better to store movies in smaller sections, load up to a RAM disk and watch from there instead of keeping the drive spinning.

You should look into the Linux 2.6 kernel's laptop mode and xine's big readahead patches.

Laptop mode will spin down your drive and buffer all writes rather than spinning it back up. When you do a read that requires data from the disk, it will spin up the disk, perform the read, perform all pending writes and spin the disk back down. After a user-defined interval (default 10 minutes) it will spin the disk up just to flush writes -- I prefer to set it to an insanely long time and then just tell it to flush manually at appropriate times (by toggling laptop mode off for a moment).

I'm not sure if it's made it into the main line yet, but a while back someone put together some patches for xine that would cause it to allocate huge RAM buffers and fill them with data from the source drive to allow the drive to spin down while the video keeps playing. This may or may not be useful when you're playing straight from DVD, since if your DVD drive may not be able to deliver the data much faster than it plays anyway. However, if you rip the DVD to disk (which is very reasonable with a 100GB drive) while connected to power, you should be able to watch your movie without spinning up the hard drive more than a handful of times (assuming plenty of RAM). Then dim the screen, use a very CPU-efficient video player (like xine), and you should be able to get lots of movie-watching time out of a battery charge.

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[Wesley Felter]

There has been some academic work on power management policies for variable-RPM disks, and IIRC Sony built a prototype. So far it hasn't caught on, probably because of cost.

Re:The next gen i-pod...

[chmilar]

I, for one, won't start saving until they come out with a replaceable battery...

Start saving!

You can replace an iPod battery yourself for $49 [ipodbattery.com], or pay Apple [apple.com] $105.95 to do it.

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[asavage]

That only works for lossless compression. As an mpeg video (VCD) has lower resolution than the original DVD, it will take a lot less time to compute. It is like the difference between mp3s at 128kbps and 320kbps. The 128kbps mp3 will take a lot less cpu to convert than 320kbps. This is noticible on an old pentium I for example where winamp can play the 128 fine, but will choke on the 320.

4200 rpm laptop drives-longer life

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a laptop only user and I prefer to use 4200 rpm drives; I dont mind they are slow.

Advantages:

Higher capacity than 5400 and 7200 rpm drives. (there are no 7200 rpm 80GB drives, only 60GB)

More importantly LONGER LIFE. My experience is limited to 52 laptop disks used in our lab for experiments of atmospheric chemistry; of these 46 are 4200 rpm drives and they are all working today. The 6 5400rpm laptop drive are all dead.
These drives are not used in laptops. They are part of custom machines sent up in baloons. 4200 drives all resisted all shocks for periods between 1 to 4 years (the oldest has a capacity of only 4 GB). All 5400 rpm drives, with capacities between 32GB and 60 GB died after only a few journeys in the air.