DailyTech - Toshiba Announces 2.5" 200GB Perpendicular HD

Submit News

Hardware Toshiba Announces 2.5" 200GB Perpendicular HD
Michael Hoffman (Blog) - June 5, 2006 6:19 PM

10 comment(s) - last by Shivian.. on Jun 6 at 3:10 AM

The hard drives with the new technology will be mass produced sometime in August

Hard drives are continuing to become bigger, faster and more efficient compared to just a few years ago. Toshiba today announced that it has a new 2.5-inch hard disk drive that can store 200GB of information on a hard drive that uses perpendicular magnetic recording technology. Although Seagate launched its 7200.10 desktop drives with perpendicular magnetic recording ahead of schedule back in April, Toshiba's MK2035GSS contains two platters that can hold 178.8 gigabits per square inch.

The official Toshiba press releases claims the hard drive will have the world's highest areal density at 178.8 gigabits per square inch. Because magnetic lines of flux go vertically across instead of laterally across, users are now able to get the same volume of magnetic dipoles that are packed into a smaller surface area. This helps users because there is much higher areal density for the same signal-to-noise ratio.

"As a leading partner for mobile PC manufacturers, we've listened to our customers' needs for high-capacity storage in a small form factor to enable the advanced multimedia applications and enriched usage experience that consumers are demanding today," sasid Scott Maccabe, vice president and general manager, Toshiba SDD.

Toshiba hopes to begin mass producing the new hard drives sometime in August. The MK2035GSS is currently on display at Computex 2006, which is taking place in Taipei, Taiwan. To read the press release, click here (PDF).

Comments

Threshold

Username
Password
remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Sucks

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 6/5/2006 1:23:25 PM , Rating: 2

At 4200RPM? I don't think so. Imagine 200GB at 4200RPM......... Anyone got a Snickers? It's gonna be a while.

RE: Sucks

By Madzombie on 6/5/2006 1:29:14 PM , Rating: 3

Actually for raw transfer speed it works the other way round. Larger drives with higher areal density will have faster transfer speeds than drives with lower areal density, as more data will be read by the drive on every revolution. Latencies will not improve though.

Parent

RE: Sucks

By mlittl3 on 6/5/2006 1:31:06 PM , Rating: 2

Yeah, that's not good. That's not good at all. Maybe 5400 RPM would be okay for the increase in storage capacity but I wouldn't want my laptop running the OS and apps off of a 4200 RPM hard drive. That speed has worked okay in the past but it's getting long in the tooth.

Parent

RE: Sucks

By Topweasel on 6/5/2006 1:52:35 PM , Rating: 2

Nah That 4200RPM drive is going to be just as fast if not faster on a defrag partition then the 7200RPM drives 3-4 years ago. On Fragmented drives though that seek time will be a killer. Though the physical size of the platters will help keep that down.

Parent

RE: Sucks

By OrSin on 6/5/2006 2:36:14 PM , Rating: 2

These should run as fast as the current 5400 2.5 drives now.
At 4200 the noise and power will be lower making this damn a good notebook drive.

Parent

RE: Sucks

By Shivian on 6/6/2006 3:10:36 AM , Rating: 2

Still... 5400rpm drive speeds suck. Let's see this on a faster drive.

Parent

RE: Sucks

By Scabies on 6/5/2006 2:42:05 PM , Rating: 2

With greater areal density, one revolution translates into the read head moving over more bits per track that a drive of a lower density.
so, if a perpendicular drive spins at a slower speed, but reads more bits per revolution, we can see increased speeds at lower RPMs.

which makes one think.. high end 1TB drives (not too far off there folks) at 15kRPM with a 16mb, or quite possibly 32mb cache... Damn, ladies and gentlemen. Damn.

Parent

RE: Sucks

By miahallen on 6/6/2006 1:13:15 AM , Rating: 2

I agree with Master Kenobi, THG recently did a 2.5" HDD round up, and found Segate's 5400.3 (160GB @ 5400RPM, first perpendicular drive on the market) to be a bit faster than the other 5400RPM drives on the market, but still no match for the 7200RPM units.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/03/notebook_dr...

Therefore, I can definitly see this being the fastest of the 4200RPM drives, but probably not quite as most of the 5400RPM drives out there. And probably nowhere near as fast as the 7200RPM drives. I think the 5400.3 would be a great compromise, and it can be found for close to 1GB/$.

Parent

2.5", yes, but is it 9.5mm thin?

By Ionizer86 on 6/5/2006 2:47:17 PM , Rating: 2

I think both Samsung and Seagate had a 160GB 2.5" drive, but the Samsung had more platters, so it wasn't the standard 9.5mm thin type.
I don't think the article mentions the Toshiba's thickness. If it's 12mm or whatever the next size up is, it wouldn't fit in many laptops...

RE: 2.5", yes, but is it 9.5mm thin?

By geepers on 6/5/2006 3:28:11 PM , Rating: 2

Yes, it is 9.5mm... The additional details are in the press release available by clicking on the link to the acrobat .pdf file in the article above...

Parent

"The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak." -- Robert Heinlein