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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
...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!
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.
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).
still looking for a wife...
Too bad I divorced mine, you could have had her.
Trolling is a art,
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.
Yeah, but laptops today are often used as desktop replacements. If you move every few months, you don't want to take a desktop computer around.
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.
"You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work."
-- Kevin Smith
She never brought you lasagna at work...your better off without her. Go after the 999,999 other ones out there and find one that will bring you lunch at work.
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
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.
I've moved 4 times in the past 2 years.
Your point?
I use my laptop as my primary machine, and I dump large files onto my desktop.
For instance, I don't need to run around everywhere with movies, and games, and everything else. That stays in the apt. When I do need to move, the desktop (mini tower) fits nicely behind the passenger seat of a car.
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
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?!
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*
I can guarantee that's NOT going to be the retail price for this thing when released to the general public. The 80GB laptop drives can be found for as low as $190. Nobody's going to pay 4 times the price for a 25% increase in capacity. (Now if we were talking Intel chip speeds, that'd be different)
I've moved once in the last ten.
But then, I'm 20 years old and still live with my parents...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.
Well, I'm 20.
Thinking about it, 4 times is a lose estimate.
When I was 18, I moved into the dorms to do summer session (damn math placemnet test and 2 questions)
Then I moved home after 5 weeks,
Moved in 2 weeks later for fall quarter
Moved home at the end of the year
Moved into apt I'm in now.
I'm moving home again in 6 weeks.
Joy!
Here, I'll give you a few tips.
Keep your life simple. Every item you bring to the dorm/apt, you have to move home eventually.
Go buy some 20 gal plastic bins. I live out of 5 of them. 2 for clean/dirty clothes. 3 for storage.
Buy a laptop and a desktop. Laptop is great for going to class (history guy talks so much, I would end up going through 3 notebooks by the end of the quarter) Desktop is to dump files on. (Do you need all that pr0n in lecture? nah. save that for when your alone in the apt.)
Don't get a sports coupe (like a miata, s2000, SLK, etc) Get a pratical car. It makes it much easier if you are going out with friends/when you move home at the end of the school year.
Also, with a high profile car (s2000, miata, SLK) it is more prone to get broken into/stolen (which just sucks)
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
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
Reminds me of something I heard recently (late 80ies):
640kB should be enough for anybody
who said that again..?
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
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 */
What he ment to say was ``640k Should Be Enough for Anybody Right NOW.'' and at that time he was right...I don't like microsoft but Bill is briliant buisness man and he know computers well enogh not to say something like that...any techie knows...it's an urban legend but i dont have a link to prove it...
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!
640kB should be enough for anybody
who said that again..?
Nobody that I know of. From what I hear, Bill Gates didn't say it either. Just an urban legend at best, a misinterpreted comment or taken out of context at worst.
8 Ball says: 'Maybe'
/* sig */
Some people, including you, are in the mindset that a laptop is a portable PC, suitable for use on airplanes, and very little else.
You see, there is a completely different sort of person out there who feels they don't need the configurability or blazing-speed performance of a desktop, and much prefer to have a computer that they can bring to work with them, over to a friends, out on vacation, on a business trip, out in the great outdoors doing whatever it is you want to do. Many of these people don't even have or want a desktop PC for which they will need a seperate monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a desk. All of this takes up significant real-estate.
Hence, the desktop-replacement laptops were born, and these people rejoiced. These people still do use their computer for everything you use it for, though, and still accumulate as much junk on their hard drives as you do, in fact generally quite a bit moreso as they don't always have a network connection, so need to keep a copy of everything they may need to use stored locally.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
It costs $50 bucks plus shipping to buy a replacement battery from a third party and it takes less than 5 minutes to install it yourself. If you don't want to deal with all of that you can fork out $100 to buy the battery from Apple and they will do the installation for you.
If you're really that concerned about the money, why in the world did you buy an iPod in the first place? Get a portable MP3 CD player that can read CD-RW's and takes regular AA batteries. Need more capacity? Easy, burn a few more CD-RW's and get a carrying case. Problem solved.
Oops, that should be 1.8", not 1.5". :$
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.
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
Still under NDA, but announcement of a 100GB drive / 5400rpm / 9.5mm will follow soon.
It's too big, which is my point.
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.
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.
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.)
Where does it mention any speeds???
It talks about accelerations!
If the impact only lasts for 1 msec and in this time it goes from 8.33 m/s to 0 m/s you already have your 850G. In normal gravity it picks up this speed in less than a second. So, pretty good for normal handling accidents (dropping a notebook on a carpet floor) but easy to exceed by throwing it out of a window on a concrete floor.
...this?
Yes, x(t)=xi+vi*t+1/2*a*t*t and v(t)=vi+a*t
;)
for v(8.33m/s)=0+g*t, t=.846s
then
x(.846s)=-3.51m
So if the time of the collision was 1ms, the drive could be dropped from a maximum height of 3.51meters.
ignoring air resistance
Since when is a Mazda Miata a "high profile" car? If your Miata did get broken into the total value of the items stolen would probably be more then the value of the car.
I mean its "high profile" in the sense that it "Catches the eye" more than say, a focus would.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
100GB is enough for many DV editing projects, though, and the performance is adequate for that task. DV only requires 3.5MB/s. People assume SCSI disks and RAID configs are important for video editing but not really at those data rates. Video editing on a notebook works fine (especially with two spindles). Sure, faster would be better but I'd rather have the space.
Still image editing takes considerable disk space these days as well. It's easy to see how a photo pro could fill a 100GB drive on a single job. My last trip had two photo pros who took home a combined 70GB after two weeks of shooting.
No, my problem is not solved, but thanks for playing. An mp3 player with a large capacity that integrates with iTunes is my only option; managing 15 gigs of music over multiple CD-RWs isn't exactly a good idea. Hence, about a year and a half ago IIRC, I went with the then-new 20 GB iPod. Since, I've replaced it twice for non-battery related problems, and I've had to replace the battery on the third one. Of course, it's over $50 because it's an "old" iPod battery, and after going through TWO batteries, I still don't have full capacity. I only get about 3 hours battery life, maximum.
Is this annoying as hell? Yes.
Could this have been avoided by running on rechargable AAs that I can buy anywhere and swap out when one set dies? Yes.
Only mac notebooks power their firewire ports unfortunately.
FirewireDirect used to sell a 2.5" notebook drive chassis with a small builting battery. I loved those since they provided a "UPS" function on the road. In 3rd world areas mains power is unreliable and not external drives are port powered on a PC.
No doubt that $1000 is a pretty sucky price. I'll stick to the 80's until that gets fixed.
You see, there is a completely different sort of person out there who feels they don't need the configurability or blazing-speed performance of a desktop, and much prefer to have a computer that they can bring to work with them, over to a friends, out on vacation, on a business trip, out in the great outdoors doing whatever it is you want to do.
...which is precisely why I bought a laptop, rather than a desktop, two years ago. It's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay easier to take everything with me -- just toss it in a backpack and I'm good to go.
I have a 40 GB internal, and right now, it's mostly plenty big, but hey, 100 GB drives will drive down the cost of smaller drives and help drive up standard internal HD sizes, so I'm all for it. When they get up to 250 GB, maybe I'll upgrade...
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
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!
http://shopper-zdnet.com.com/Toshiba_MK4004GAH___h ard_drive___40_GB___ATA_100/4014-3186_15-30680986. html?tag=pl&q=Toshiba
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 --]
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
Dude, you moved between dorms (probably in the same city), a short drive away. I've moved between 6 cities in 4 countries in the last 10 years or so. A desktop doesn't fit into your hand luggage, a laptop does ;-)
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