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

The next gen i-pod...

[ThomasFlip]

better start saving.

Re:Remember, Kids!

[cozziewozzie]

This drive will be important for laptop users. Currently 60GB on a laptop is considered good, 80GB a luxury. The laptops have displays, processors and RAM to match the desktop computers, but HD capacity is one area where they're severely lacking. It's nice to see that Toshiba is pushing the envelope here.

Cool...but no thanks

[hdd]

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!)

They also seem to have a 100GB 1.8"(!) drive

[phr1]

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.

Re:MP3 players based on this drive?

[Lane.exe]

Screw that. If Apple fits a 100 gig drive into something like that, why not make a portable video player out of it too? Throw on mpeg, quicktime and divx support and you could put whole DVDs on there.

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.

ata/100

[Coneasfast]

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.

What this means for consumers

[Seekerofknowledge]

..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.

Re:Remember, Kids!

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Capacity is half of the problem with laptop drives. But data through-put is just as big. Sure this has an ATA-6 interface, but what is the actual sustained data transfer rate? With a rotational speed of only 4,200 RPM, I'm betting it is pretty poor. The latency of 12ms seeks won't help much either.

I'm running 15,000 RPM drives in my desktop machine with average seek times right around 3ms. No wonder laptops seem so many times slower when loading a program from disk.

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

[ron_ivi]

You can (technologically, perhaps not legally) always rip the DVD to HD before your trip.

Your battery life will be much improved watching the video from hard drive. Also if you recompress the video to something smaller (say, VCD-like) your CPU won't have to do as much work playing it back either.

80GB laptop disks-NOT a luxury

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

(OT) Re:Remember, Kids!

[janbjurstrom]

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)?

Hitachi to follow soon

[Anonymous Coward]

Still under NDA, but announcement of a 100GB drive / 5400rpm / 9.5mm will follow soon.

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

[B747SP]

Well, it doesn't hurt, but it's not a huge deal.

It is a huge deal (well, large-ish, maybe not huge) from the POV of those little portable external drive cases. I'm using a bunch of the firewire (AUD$60) version of this and also these. The 60Gb and 80Gb drives (Fujitsu from memory) that I'm using now draw just a little bit more power than USB1.1 and USB2.0 can supply, so I need to use a plugpack power supply or one of those silly little parasite cables that draw keyboard port power to provide the extra poofteenth of an amp that they need to spin up and run.

OK, so it's not a big deal, but I'm a fan of bus powered devices. One less cable to lose! If the new Toshiba drive is at a point where they can run off a USB or firewire bus (ack that 4 pin firewire doesn't have power), then yeah, I'm interested.