Toshiba 40GB Perpendicular Magnetic Record Drives

freitasm writes "Toshiba is now shipping a 40GB 1.8" hard disk, the first in the industry based on the PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology. The disk stores 40GB in a single platter, and there are plans to release a 80GB version later this year. The first models are already being used on Toshiba's new Gigabeat MP3 players." It's all part of their plan to squeeze more bits onto the head of a pin.

Comments

Re:Is 40GB the smallest you can buy now?

[speeDDemon (nw)]

40Gb may be common in desktop computers, However a 1.8" drive is NOT common in desktop computers.

That's awesome.

[millennial]

I've been waiting patiently for this. However, I'd like to see them in standard sizes for IDE or SATA, not just for MP3 players... and what's with the whole "40GB is 10,000 songs" thing? What, are all songs recorded so that they'll be compressed to exactly 4MB now?
/joke?

Recording method not important

[davidwr]

99% of people don't care about the recording method. All they care about are things like price, size, performance, and other characteristics like noise, heat, etc.

Give me small, dense, long-lasting, zillions of read/write cycles, low heat/energy, fast, compatible with existing equipment or cheap adapter card, etc. etc. and I won't care if it's flat, perpendicular, or shaped like a three-dimensional pretzel, er, I mean a protien.

Re:Raid 5 for my laptop when?

[adolf]

Raid 5? In a single unit? Forget the fact that it's in a laptop - the mere notion of a RAID array in a single device is, itself, absurd.

You get all of the disadvantages of extra mechanical complication, along with none of the advantages (speed[1], or otherwise) of RAID.

Count me out.

[1]: See, it sounds like a good theory. But you'll get more speed by just using a single, larger-diameter disc than you will by using several smaller-diameter discs. If RPM is constant, and diameter increases, then so does linear velocity, and thus data rates. Etc, so on, so forth. Unless you're going to be using lots of independant discs, it's not advantageous. Oh, and it's a laptop, which is presumably meant to run on batteries at least some of the time. It's almost always more efficient to run one motor, than it is to run several of them, along with several sets of controller electronics, and several sets of head actuators, and...

Lossless!

[tepples]

And every byte [of the 120 MB hard drive in a music player] is in legal, bought-and-paid-for music, right?

"Legal"? Remember that a CD in FLAC or Apple Lossless format is about 0.3 GB. It's not unheard of for somebody who's been collecting CDs since 1985 to own 400 CDs, especially if the collector has been hitting the pawn shops, garage sales, thrift stores, and half.com. Do the math. And as for "bought-and-paid-for", you're referring to the legislators who work on copyright law, right?

Big Blue Shift

[Doc Ruby]

How come Toshiba and Hitachi can make profits on the HD biz, but IBM couldn't?

Re:40GB?

[kesuki]

who says 30/MB second? that's the data rate of the 1.8 inch drive. i'm going to assume that a full 3.5 inch should be able to sustain 200-400 MB/sec depending on platter rotation. (200 MB/sec for 5400 rpm, and 400 MB/sec for 10k rpm) this is of course, only applicable for platters that have 10x the arial density, hitachi is currently only planning a drive that uses 2x the areial density, so it should only be 40-80 MB/second. of course... SATA II can only handle 300 MB/sec for all SATA 2 devices connected, and the sata Spec was only engineered around a theoretical peak of 600 MB/sec... and then you have the limitations of the FSB etc etc..

the reason why they're going 'slow' with the perpendicular technology is because well, they've been stuck at 100GB/platter for a loong time now and they want a good 5 step 10-30 year migration to the full 1 tb/platter configuration. so they can 'keep the upgrade cycle' going. fortunately, we already have UHDV taking a good 3.5 TB per 18 minutes so those 5 TB drives will be sure to be made obsolete whenever 400 TB (40 hours UHDV) rewriteable multi layer holographic media is designed for hard drive use (ie: near instant random data seek, multi point lasers to acheive HD comperable data thruput rates etc.)