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Hardware New Toshiba 1.8" Hard Drives
Brandon Hill (Blog) - September 13, 2006 8:15 AM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 24 comment(s) - last by mino.. on Sep 14 at 6:16 PM
Toshiba reveals new 40GB, 80GB 1.8" hard drives

Toshiba has announced its new family of 1.8" hard drives which are 10% smaller than its first generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) HDDs. With the new 80GB model, a total of 40,000 songs, 200 hours of video or 3,000 photos can be stored.

The two new models introduced, the 40GB MK4009GAL and 80GB MK8009GAH, are both 4200RPM units which feature an areal density of 134 gigabits per square inch. Given their reduced footprint, the 40GB and 80GB drives now measure 54x71x5mm and 54x71x8mm respectively. The drives weigh in at 48 grams and 59 grams respectively. Toshiba has also bumped up the maximum cache size to 8MB for increased performance.

The new drives are expected to further strengthen Toshiba lead in the 1.8" hard drive market where it has over 86% marketshare. The drives are expected to be available in a wide variety of consumer electronic devices including digital audio players, portable media players, GPS devices and digital camcorders. In fact, one device is already using the new 80GB drive.

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argh matey
By GhandiInstinct on 9/13/2006 9:47:30 AM , Rating: 1
Are these perpendicular drives limited to 4200RPM?




RE: argh matey
By SexyK on 9/13/2006 9:58:06 AM , Rating: 2
The fact that they use perpendicular recording doesn't limit the rotation speed. In this case the "low" rotation speed is a byproduct of the small physical size of the drive, i believe.


RE: argh matey
By GhandiInstinct on 9/13/2006 10:04:35 AM , Rating: 1
So has it reached it's limit?


RE: argh matey
By mendocinosummit on 9/13/2006 10:27:52 AM , Rating: 2
Has what reached its limit; rotations or capacity? The low rotations are for a quiet use and for low power benefits. Also, with the high density this drive would out perform a 5400 drive from a few years ago.


RE: argh matey
By Johnmcl7 on 9/13/2006 10:30:31 AM , Rating: 2
I wouldn't say that - I have a 60GB 1.8in drive in an ultralight Vaio, the drive is painfully slow.

John


RE: argh matey
By mendocinosummit on 9/13/2006 12:32:12 PM , Rating: 2
What is it's denisty per square inch and also, I find 5400 painfully slow. Even 7200's when not in raid on my desktop seem slow; currently the major bottleneck in my comp.


RE: argh matey
By Johnmcl7 on 9/13/2006 6:11:23 PM , Rating: 2
No I was referring other laptop 5400rpm drives(as per your comment), not hard drives in general - if going for performance I'd choose an older 5400rpm drive of lower capacity rather than a 1.8inch hard drive as the latter is pretty much the slowest going.

John


RE: argh matey
By mino on 9/14/2006 6:16:01 PM , Rating: 2
depends..

I still have '98 7200rpm IBM drives in operation.

Guess what, their top linear speed is ~ 13MBps ...

Funny those veterans are pretty healthy even after 8yrs of server operation...

That PPro ruled the world by that time!

Now it's just nice to have such a reliable old friend to run one's FW and P2P :)
;)


Flash is the future...
By therealnickdanger on 9/13/2006 10:14:18 AM , Rating: 2
Small HDDs are cool, I really like them, but if I had to choose between one of these or a 32GB flash drive, even with the massive price difference, I would probably go flash.




RE: Flash is the future...
By ksherman on 9/13/2006 10:56:52 AM , Rating: 2
true, but there is also the little matter of the massive price difference :-)


RE: Flash is the future...
By plewis00 on 9/13/2006 11:46:38 AM , Rating: 2
I would agree since I had had 5 iPod hard disks fail on me to date (a 3G, 2 x Mini and 2 x 5G Video) and with the exception of the Minis (which were used whilst running and in the gym), the other 3 were treated *exceptionally carefully*. It seems the smaller you make the hard disks, also the smaller the error to trip it up. A bit like the difference between CDs and DVDs (though the DVDs had better ECC). However, as flash becomes cheaper to make, I would hope we would see the movement towards solid state rather than spinning media. Laptops are all well and good where they are normally set down on a firm(ish) table before use, portable music players, no... the new iPod Nano seems to be bringing this closer to reality, 8Gb is a relatively phenomenal amount.


RE: Flash is the future...
By Xenoterranos on 9/13/2006 2:08:11 PM , Rating: 2
Wow. I would have started shopping around for a non-ipod after the 2nd failure. I hope most of those where free replacements.


Unnecessary?
By AncientPC on 9/13/2006 11:05:54 AM , Rating: 2
I understand that marketing likes to put 80GB in terms the average consumer can understand like, "a total of 40,000 songs, 200 hours of video or 3,000 photos can be stored" but is that really necessary for an IT oriented site such as DT?




RE: Unnecessary?
By AncientPC on 9/13/2006 11:09:01 AM , Rating: 2
These descriptions are often misleading as there is no real standard size for these file types. According to the OP:
songs = 2MB each
video = 400MB/hr
photos = 26.67MB each?!?


RE: Unnecessary?
By Lazarus Dark on 9/13/2006 12:24:13 PM , Rating: 2
er.. what size photos are those? like 30 megapixel? or maybe RAW?


RE: Unnecessary?
By psychobriggsy on 9/13/2006 11:35:22 AM , Rating: 2
I see they're using 64kbps 'quality' audio, rather than something better - 128kbps AAC would be the logical unit to use. I think it is disingenious to use such low bitrates when the market leader is 128kbps - who rips at 64kbps anyway? Maybe for an audio book...

A 4 minute 128kbps AAC file uses 3.75MB.
An 80GB hard drive actually only has 74.5GB of storage. So it holds 20,000 songs in the most common format used by online music stores.

iTunes Store movies are encoded at 1.5mbps. That means the hard drive can store 115 hours of movies. I think the old iTunes videos were stored at half that bitrate, so 230 hours of 750kbps video.


8GB cache? Where did this breakthrough come from?
By AMDfreak on 9/13/2006 9:50:31 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
Toshiba has also bumped up the maximum cache size to 8GB for increased performance.


Shurely there musht be shome mishtake. 8 MB cache maybe?




By Brandon Hill (blog) on 9/13/2006 9:51:59 AM , Rating: 3
007, is that you? ;)


By Souka on 9/13/2006 10:37:47 AM , Rating: 1
fixed


Error
By mendocinosummit on 9/13/2006 9:51:36 AM , Rating: 2
8 GB cache, sweet!




RE: Error
By mendocinosummit on 9/13/2006 9:52:08 AM , Rating: 2
Somebody beat me to it.


RE: Error
By Souka on 9/13/2006 10:37:59 AM , Rating: 1
fixed


Used in the new ipod
By BigLan on 9/13/2006 12:02:41 PM , Rating: 2
I wonder if that 80gb is what's in the new ipod. It also suggests that the 30gb ipod is going to see a bump to 40gb fairly soon, though maybe they're just waiting for the fullscreen ipod in the new year to go with 40/80 gb models.