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."

Comments

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.


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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.

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.