Micro Vaults - Small Hard Disks Get Larger And Larger

January 16, 2002
Maury Wright, Editor-in-Chief

http://www.e-insite.net/commvergemag/index.asp?layout=article&articleId=CA191490

The masters of magnetic storage continue to amaze in disk drives of all sizes. Desktop PC drives from many vendors easily top 100 Gbytes, but what’s going on at the miniature end of the market is more important for many mobile or portable convergence applications.

Toshiba, for instance has offered a family of 1.8-inch drives in 2- and 5-Gbyte capacities that, until Apple’s iPod arrived, had found use primarily as PC-Card drives for removable storage on notebook PCs. With devices like music players, digital cameras, PDAs, and wearable computers begging for more storage capacity, Toshiba is significantly raising the bar with new 10- and 20-Gbyte versions of the same drive. Smaller in footprint than a credit card, the MK1003GAL (10 Gbytes) and MK2003GAH (20 Gbytes) stand just 5 and 8 millimeters high, respectively.

These new higher capacities could boost the 1.8-inch form factor out of its current specialty niche. Until now, 1.8-inch disks couldn’t compete capacity-wise with 2.5-inch drives, yet they have cost more to build. Clearly, at 20 Gbytes, these new products can serve in notebooks aimed at users who are willing to pay a premium for small size and low weight. In the portable and mobile consumer-product space, the drives will battle IBM’s even smaller and lighter 1-inch Microdrive for market share. Today, the Microdrive stores as much as 1 Gbyte, but IBM has promised a 3-Gbyte model later this year.