Slashdot Mirror
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."
Wait...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
better start saving.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
S-ATA is in the hizouse!
...by the size of his hard drive.
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
that's a spicy meatball! in all seriousness, how long until this is priced and packaged to sell in an OEM enviroment? until they can deliever on an enterprise level they will only remain a favorite of hobbists.
CB32
free ipod and free gmail!
Exactly why I run a desktop...to dump all my files on, so I don't spend a grand just on laptop storage.
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Makes you kinda wonder... what exactly is small?
Maybe with these drives, we'll be able to increase the last 'bandwidth' pigeon test :)
It is amazing the speed difference between a 5400RPM drive and 7200RPM drive.
Will there be MP3 players with this drive in them in the near future?
How about a 100 GB Apple iPod?
The OEM sample price is about $1,092 USD...but don't ask me what that means for consumers... It means that five years from now, it'll cost $10.92 or less.
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
The OEM sample price is about $1,092 USD...but don't ask me what that means for consumers
It means not many will care to have one for a while. At least not until they are comperable to today's 2.5 inch drives (+/- a 100 USD).
I'll get these out of the way early: Why would I buy an iPod for $250 when for 800 dollars more I could get 25 times the capacity with this... Does it support .ogg?
I thought I was the only one who used English measurements for measurements longer than 1 inch, and Metric (millimeters, centimeters) for smaller than 1 inch of length. It sure does look odd in print: "The car wash? Oh. Go 2 km down the road. Turn right, and go 100 feet. You can't miss it!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Only $1,092 dollars for a 100 gig hard drive, sign me up.
I know what would help iPod: a battery that you could actually buy in most stores, and replace just by opening a hatch. No more problem of tossing out the iPod to buy a new one when the battery dies. That would be an advance, no other competitor has a thing like that!
Now my palm can store 100gb of data.
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
and
Here
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
definitly not for average laptop user, i rather bring a 300GB external drive with me if i need all that extra space on the move. imagine putting one of these babies in the ipod or a mpeg4 camcorder.(patent pending idea!)
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
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.
Looks like atto/zepto/yocto aren't far behind. Maybe we should go back to the naming convention where the metric prefix actually referred to the scale of the item in question; i.e. nanobots on the nanometer scale.
I said this back when they came out with 20GB laptop drives and I'll say it again. Do you really want to carry around that much information on a laptop or PDA? Do you really need to?
How many MP3s do you have? You aren't using your laptop for porn, are you?
Dropping the power consumption by 20% sounds like a win.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I just picked up an IBM Thinkpad X30, 3.5lbs and loving it. Once you've switched from hauling around an 8 pounder to something half its weight you have a hard time going back...
I saw some mention somewhere of a trade show demo of an ultra-thin subnotebook that had a 100GB 1.8" drive, like the drive in an iPod (those are currently available up to 40 GB and the 40GB drive is about $200 retail from dealers). I figure the 100GB version will be available by the end of the year.
The problem here is that most people wouldn't need something like this: people can listen to music and do a million things. You can't do much but watch video while it's on.
Then again, the video for portable entertainment on long plane flights is appealing.
IAALS.
whether it supports ata/100 is irrelevant, considering the RPM is only 4,200, which is the more important fact. the transfer rate won't even get anywhere close to ata/100 speeds at 4200rpm.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Let's see... 2.5 inch... less than 1cm tall... I've got a drive in my laptop that's 30 GB that size. 100GB is impressive, but is it really worth $1000? I mean if I've got portable storage requirements (video, maybe?) that big, I'd probably be better off with a USB 2.0 external... higher transfer rates and a third the cost...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
This just looks to be an incremental improvment over their existing 80 GB drive. Nothing revolutionary here. Ho hum.
Why the heck would anyone need this capacity on a laptop? Storing their gargantuan mp3 and porno collection to impress the stewardesses?
Honestly, outside of digital video, that much storage is useless, and for DV editing, it's not really enough, anyhow. Especially considering it's not going to be nearly as fast as a 10,000RMP SCSI drive, and even more so VS. a SCSI or FC RAID.
Who's the target audience for a thousand dollar 100Gig laptop drive? I just don't see it.
Because for hard drives, 2.5" refers to a standard form factor. Height is expressed more clearly in millimeters, though, since the difference between 9mm and 10mm (for example) is .04".
just like to clarify, none of my opinions, or input is on the grandparent post. that was a simple copy & paste of what TFA said.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
..but don't ask me what that means for consumers
What this means for consumers is that, after prices come down, we are talking about some serious storage capabilities in portable devices. Something like the ipod mini, except more on the order of 150gigs, 200gigs, who knows by the time the price comes down.
It would be a mini personal server, where you could carry around with you almost all convenient data you would want, really. Your entire music collection...your entire divx collection...both? How about something like your resume, all of your email, some source code you are working on. Whatever. This idea has been thrown around here on slashdot before, it's nothing new. But at least now it would be more applicable.
An upgrade for my iBook!
*twitch*
Seriously, 20GB is too big? What about those games that routinely take 2-3 gigs? What about those of us that use labtops as our primary computer? Silly Rabbit, Labtops are for adults!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Better toss in a plutonium battery, too.
Heck, you could even power your house with it then! (or at least a couple aligator clips attatched to your genitals). Ohhh! The BSDM audio/visual house powering digital player. I'm sold.
Or get yourself one of those little Shuttle barebones boxes - they're still pretty portable, and while they're more expensive than the external drive, you can do a lot more with them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The km example was just another way to show use of mixed measurements.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I don't think TA is F.
shouldnt that be 'and the weight is 3 ounces, 10.5g'?
My Toshiba CD-RW can only burn ~500MB of a 700MB CD-R without errors, the writable capacity of this drive is probably closer to 71 GB.
And considering that said CD-RW drive can't read a burned file larger than 133MB, the read capacity of this hard drive is probably closer to 19 GB.
I, for one, could care less about the size increases of the newer drives. I would rather have something that works as advertised for longer than the warranty period.
Why would I ever buy a 100 GB hard drive if it was going to fail before I could fully use that capacity?
Why, when hard drive speed is the single largest factor affecting perceived system performance, do manufacturers insist on improving storage capacity at the expense of speed and reliability?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
When my laptop is sitting on my desk, it's plugged into the 400 FireWire 120GB external enclosure. I built it, cheap, 150$, max.
It's not that hard.
When I need to carry files around, they get written to the disc. When not, I don't store them. 256,512,etc USB keychains work VERY well, too.
For those of you who will go 'Well, you can't very well carry that around all the time' - I don't. It's a drop box. It gets plugged into the deskbox when not in use, so I can sftp and grab what I need if needbe.
I've never really found a need for excessive laptop harddrive space.
Informatus Technologicus
Viagra? I thought it was Levitra. I hear that'll extend the life up to 4 hours.
Welcome to 1997 (I think?).
(yes, I know it will be cheaper in the future with demand/etc...)
/* sig */
My school uses Toshiba Tablets and is scedualed to upgrade next year. Will I get one of these?
for every possible HDD innovation?
Really, until you get 100GB into something the size of a pinhead, don't waste my time.
The iPod uses a 1.5" drive, so this isn't going to help iPod capacity unfortunately...
You can get an 80 GB laptop disk for only $189 (www.basoncomputer.com)
I always buy laptops with smaller disks and relpace them with the largest size available. It is usually cheaper than buying a laptop with a big drive; In addition I get a spare drive, which I put in a firewire box. I always use laptops for which the drive can be easily replaced (IBM, Fujitsu, etc) Stay away from Sony!
Nope. This is a 2.5" drive, which is too big. The iPod Mini uses the Microdrive; the white iPod has a 1.8" drive. This drive will fit in neither device. In fact, it's wider than the entire iPod. Of course, over time the iPod will have more and more capacious drives. But this isn't one of them.
Oops, that should be 1.8", not 1.5". :$
Interesting, I'm in the market for a new box. Got any pointers on your drives - make/model, pros/cons, performance (any quick numbers on real-world read/write)? And, what's your experience with noise and vibrations (not a consideration, or important and influencing your decision)?
668.5
I have 80 Gb drives on both my laptops, Thinkpad 41 Centrino + Fujitsu P1120 Crusoe. They both came with small drives (40 GB, and 30 GB respectively)
For both machines the partition table has the following structure
hda1 hda2 (hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9) hda3 hda4
hda1, hda5 are usually used for two versions of windows (NTFS), hda6 is a HUGE Fat 32 partition (28GB) for common (temporary) data. hda7 hda8 hda9 are about 8GB each and are used for warious Linux distrubutions; sometimes I put Free BSD; hda3 and hda4 are used for playing with other operating systems which need primary partitions. I currently have QNX and BeOS.
I NEVER keep my personal data for long time on my computers, but on extermal laptop drives in firewire boxes + two USB keys (a 256 MB, 1GB, respectively)
The internal laptop drives are used for operating systems and applications, nothing else.
Temoporary I store files on hda6 (Fat 32, 28 GB) but then I move them to the firewire drives. Hda6 is not a permanent storage space, just a buffer.
Still under NDA, but announcement of a 100GB drive / 5400rpm / 9.5mm will follow soon.
It's too big, which is my point.
www.ipodbattery.com sels ipod batteries for $50. The battery comes with a tool and instructions for replacing the battery.
By following their instructions I opened my brand new 40 GB iPod just to see what is inside. The hard disk is a 40 GB Toshiba PCMCIA drive. If you remove it you can put it in the PCMCIA slot of any laptop and it works.
A few online stores sell this Toshiba 40 GB PCMCIA drive for prices around $700-800, more expensie than the iPod itself, which costs only $500.
hahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa...!
who says the editors aren't watching huh?
As capacity goes up, so does data density, which means that there'll (most likely) be more bits stored in a given track.
Disks with higher capacity will naturally have a higher transfer rate at the same RPM.
The RPM helps a lot when it comes to average seek time though.
I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I thought that the spindle speed was more a measure a seek time instead of transfer speed. I thought that transfer speed was usually limited by the interface. Would someone care to comment?
According to his theory downloading movies does not offer 'instant gratification' and for this reason NOBODY would buy a video iPod.
He said that the iPod and iTunes are doing well because downloading music offers 'instant gratification'.
RCA already has something like that out. The Lyra RD2780, which sports a 3.5" LCD screen, and houses a 20GB HD (while upgrading this to a 80GB drive is well documented). The RCA unit is $400, can hold a dozen movies, with plenty of room left for MP3s; much more useful than an iPod.
Oh yeah, it has a compactflash slot, albeit only to use as a memory card expansion port (no WiFi, but then again, it's an entertainment device, not a frickin computer).
I have one and it's served its use on long flights cross-country, where the in-flight movie is a stupid Hillary Duff flick ("My eyes! The goggles do nothing!").
Wrong hands? Seriously? I guess I don't wear a tin foil hat. Its not that I don't value my privacy, but there really isn't anything that embarising or valuable. Don't get me wrong I value my data as well, hence the weekly backups, but honestly 20 gigs is so little space these days. Especially, for a triple boot system. Well if you can do it, more power to you. I'm just suggusting that msot people (especially slashdotters) use more than 20 gigs. Heck, my parents of all people put their 40 gig harddrive to full use! Powerpoint, scanned photo albumns, specialized apps, 19 years of documents, homework assignments, and emails it all adds up.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The new drive's shock resistance of 3,185 m/s2 (325G, 2msec) is 50% higher than in Toshiba's current 2.5-inch HDD*, due to employment of the smaller, lighter Femto Sliders in combination with a lighter head-suspension and head arm.
Shock resistance: Operating: 3,185m/s2 (325G, 2msec)
Non-operating: 8,330m/s2 (850G, 1msec)
In comparison, many modern desktop drives can handle 60/300Gs.
I think the only place those sorts of speeds might see real-world testing is on a crashing supersonic airplane.
Isn't it comforting to know that your laptop's data will be safe after you're gone?
Everybody is think about the power consumption in terms of laptops only (which makes sense, it's a laptop drive)
What they're forgetting is that these drive are used in all other sorts of portable devices where the drive is the largest consumer of power. Two that immediately come to min are:
1) hard-drive based MP3 Players (Ok, not iPod)
2) Direct-to-HD DV video recorders
For these devices, battery life is really essential (what use is space for 8 hours of DV footage if your battery cops out after 6?)
The extra 25% battery life (Do the math: 1/(1-.20)) means longer unwired time!
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.
Toshiba claims that this design sets "a new benchmark for areal density: 80-gigabits of data per square inch."
I don't know much about HD design, but I'm assuming that the reason you get faster transfers from drives with higher RPM is that the head passes over more bits per second, which it can read in and hand over to the CPU. So, couldn't you get the same effect from a lower RPM drive with the bits packed closer together?
e.g., If you double the areal bit-density, you should multiply the number of bits per track by approximately sqrt(2)=1.4, so the bits per revolution will be multiplied by 1.4, which makes a 4200 RPM drive equivalent to a 5900 RPM drive, in terms of the number of bits the head sees per second. (But also by this theory, physically small drives will always be slower than larger drives with the same RPM, since there are fewer bits per track, unless they can manage to acheive a higher bit-density. So maybe the Toshiba just comes out even with a 4200 RPM desktop drive.)
...this?
Who would want a 100 GB watch?
and 64 MB of RAM is Plenty
- no one will ever use all of it...
If you're going to watch 100 gig of video you would need very very very long plane flight indeed. I've got about 80 gigs of MP3s here, maybe you could listen to those during your very very very very very very very long flight instead...
How about in the Archos AV-320? From a HD upgrade page for it "any 2.5" 9.5mm-height notebook/laptop style hard drive should work fine" so the drive would fit.
Archos's site says it can do Xvid and Divx and has a 3.8" 320x240 screen (with TV out ) and will handle files up to 640x386@25fps.
Oh and it has an optional recorder module .
Couldn't they try and make hard drives that doesn't fail after a year instead?
where could I buy a 40GB PCMCIA TOSHIBA DRIVE FOR ONLY $200?
The prices I found are around $700-800, $200-300 more expensive than the 40GB iPod which costs only $500.
For $200 you cvould get an 1.0 4GB toshiba drive, that is if you are lucky.
The cheapest way to get a 40GB PCMCIA TOSHIBA DRIVE is to buy an iPod, destroy it and retrieve the drive
I want a 9.5cm thick hd, that holds 1tb.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I used to think that.
Then I saw someone with a DVD, a Quake 3 game, and a UT2k3 demo all running in windows with mozilla browsing a forum on a screenshot.
My mind is still trying to parse how that set-up works.
I once tried to use my palm pilot as a video iPod. With a video player app, and a memory card big enough to hold an episode of star trek, I could catch up on my TV viewing over lunch. Enough capacity for my use.
Except, I'd have to hold the farking video iPod at arms length for an hour, or stare at my lap at a crooked angle. Not worth the bother. Wake me up again when ultralight head mounted displays are $100. As soon as that happens, and I can watch a movie while wearing a pair of sunglasses, and lounging -- That's when the video iPod will matter!
does it run Linux?
What is this? Imperial units for one dimension and SI units for another.
price is about $1,092 USD
That sigh in front of your number means dollars and the "D" at the end of the acronym means... dollars.
And if the prise is about $1092 does it mean that is's somewhere between $1091,50 and $1092,49?
"...It's a 2.5 inch drive, is only 9.5mm..."
Wonderful, and I suppose we should describe its rotation speed in radians per fortnight? Come on, let's pick a unit and use it.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
A drive that is 2.5" in size and 9.55 mm thick?
Well, I know the car with tank that can hold as much as 20 gallons of fuel, while it's average consumption is 5.3 litres per 100km...
Yes, they're nice and portable and can be drop-in replacements. But this discussion grew out of the outrageous $1092 price tag for the 100GB 2.5" disk drive. The way you fix that is to use 3.5" drives, which have much more capacity for much less money, e.g. 200GB is about US$100-150. 3.5" drives are also usually faster, though if your laptop only has USB1.x that won't matter much.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The MKxxxxGAP model got max of 40 GB. and all the newer ones like this MK1031GAS is GAS model. Will this works on my old sony sr-series notebook? What is the difference between GAS and GAP model?
Thanks!
Don't use MPlayerOSX; it's not optimized well for PowerPC and is a major CPU hog.
Try VLC; it's MUCH faster. Whereas decoding a 640x480 DivX pegs my CPU on my Powerbook G4 with MPlayer, it only sucks down around 20% using VLC, with no noticeable loss in quality.
-Z
Indeed, where are the HMD's for a video iPod or other player? I don't want to crick my neck peering at a tiny display.
There's a list but nothing you can try and buy at the local computer store.
=S