DailyTech - Toshiba Announces 320GB 2.5-inch Notebook Hard Drive

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Hardware Toshiba Announces 320GB 2.5-inch Notebook Hard Drive
Wolfgang Hansson (Blog) - August 21, 2007 6:46 PM

20 comment(s) - last by Dactyl.. on Sep 7 at 5:37 PM

Toshiba announces the highest capacity notebook hard drive yet at 320GB

When it comes to the hard drives inside our notebook computers most of us want more capacity and faster speeds. Typically the largest hard drive you find in a notebook computer is 200GB.

Toshiba today announced a new 2.5”, 5400rpm, 3Gbps SATA hard drive aimed at the notebook computer market that has significantly higher storage capacity today. The 320GB drive packs an areal density of 254 Gbits per square inch into two platters holding 160GB of data each.

Data is written to the dual platters via perpendicular magnetic recording processes first seen on Seagate desktop hard drives. Toshiba says the media transfer rate is 801 Mbps and the average seek time is 12ms.

This performance is very close to that of the 200GB 7200rpm drive Toshiba also announced today that has an average seek time of 12ms as well, but a faster 895.9 Mbps media transfer time.

The 320GB drive belongs to Toshiba’s MKxx52GSX series of drives and has 250GB, 160GB, 120GB, and 80GB stable mates. One of the things that makes life so hard on notebook hard drives is the risk of shock from drops and bumps. Your desktop drive may run it’s entire life without being moved, where as a notebook tends to have miles put on it quickly. Toshiba says the operating shock resistance of the 320GB drive is 350G and the non-operating shock resistance is 900G, which should make the drives very durable. All the new 5400rpm drives have an 8MB cache.

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:( ATA/IDE?

By phaxmohdem on 8/21/2007 9:17:25 PM , Rating: 2

I sure wish they would throw the older ATA/IDE interface a bone with these new hard drives. The largest I can find on Newegg ATM is 160GB. I would love to slap one of these babies into my T40p but alas... No SATA. I imagine the same is true for many others out there in "Lap-o-sphere" <-- LOL I should kick my own ass for that typing that word.

RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By oab on 8/21/07, Rating: -1

RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By phaxmohdem on 8/21/2007 10:00:56 PM , Rating: 3

I understand the need to move things along technologically, but I think that there is still a viable market for larger IDE laptop drives for people like myself who have an older, yet still perfectly usable laptop system.

I mean, slap a different logic board on it, and hell... sell it at a slight markup even.

Even desktop drives (barring the newly released 1TB drives) all have IDE counterparts. And I am fairly certain that SATA has been around in the mainstream on desktops quite a bit longer than it has on laptops.

Bottom line, I'm not going to throw my current laptop, which I know and love, in the trash to get a new hard drive interface that is marginally faster and gives me a few extra minutes of battery life... Unless you have a couple grand you'd like to donate to me for a new T61p ;)

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By phaxmohdem on 8/21/2007 10:28:38 PM , Rating: 3

quote:
With laptops, as everyone should know, if you want something newer then what you have in it when it ships, you gotta buy a new one.

Just for everyone's clarification, laptops are not as locked down as that statement make them out to be. RAM, Hard Drives, Optical Drives, Internal Wi-Fi/Modems, even Processors & LCD panels (If you know what you are doing) can usually be upgraded.

The only real non-upgradeable parts are the motherboard & Graphics Card... as form factors change with just about every laptop generation... Though I'm sure there are some who have successfully upgraded a motherboard or video card in a laptop before.

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By Samus on 8/22/07, Rating: 0

RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By InsaneScientist on 8/22/2007 4:34:43 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
You've got to be joking. You practically just said laptops are about as flexible to upgrade than a desktop. That's the most rediculous technical statement I've ever seen.

No he didn't... Where on earth did you get that from??

Let's examine his post:

quote:
With laptops, as everyone should know, if you want something newer then what you have in it when it ships, you gotta buy a new one.

quote:
Just for everyone's clarification, laptops are not as locked down as that statement make them out to be.

That's true. Laptops definately can be taken apart and upgraded.

quote:
RAM, Hard Drives, Optical Drives, Internal Wi-Fi/Modems, even Processors & LCD panels (If you know what you are doing) can usually be upgraded.

That's all true too.

Ram can be upgraded... not neccesarily as much as a desktop, since no notebook has more than 2 SODIMM slots, wheras many desktops have 4 DIMM slots, but that certainly doesn't mean that it can't be upgraded.

Hard Drives can be upgraded, again not as much as a desktop, as a notebook can only take 1, maybe 2, HDDs, but a desktop can handle 2, 4, 6, or more, depending on the case.

Upgrading Internal WiFi/Modem cards is usually simply a matter of opening the appropriate panel on the bottom of the laptop, pulling the miniPCI card out, and putting a new one in. As simple as changing RAM.

Processors can be upgraded, assuming that the chipset and BIOS will support the new processor. It may take some time to take the computer apart, but most of the time, laptops use a standard socket, so it's easy to upgrade a CPU. Admittedly it's harder than a desktop, but it's quite doable.

LCD panels are tough to upgrade, but again, it is possible with a little research.

Graphics Cards are usually soldered to the motherboard, but this is changing, to a degree. More laptops (still not many, but more) are shipping with the GFX card connected via a standardized PCIe bus (obviously it's a miniature version), and those are upgradable.

In all of that, I see a claim that it's possible to upgrade a laptop (as opposed to not being able to upgrade at all, which is what the first post implied), but nowhere does he claim that you can upgrade a laptop as easily as a desktop.
Many of the components that you can upgrade are the same, but your selection is more limited with a notebook, and the actual upgrade process is more time consuming and difficult.

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By Souka on 8/22/2007 6:02:21 PM , Rating: 2

I've worked on Dell, IBM/Lenovo, and HP laptop systems.

Pentium 3, 4, and M processor lines...

Upgrading CPU, wi-fi, video (if even physically possible) is often stopped because the BIOS will not allow it.

If you're lucky, you get a "unsupported device" warning.... but typically I've experienced a "cannot continue" message.

I'm talking about replacing a 802.11b card with a non-oem 802.11b/g card, or a 1.6ghz PentiumM with a 2Ghz pentium M CPU.

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By phaxmohdem on 8/22/2007 7:13:42 PM , Rating: 2

Systems with older Banias Based Pentium M's are naturally not going to be compatible with Dothan based chips... Which I suspect may be the issue you ran into.

Also it is true that on some systems (notably Thinkpads) if you swap the Wi-Fi card or install an unsupported on it throws up an error. This is easily by-passable however... If you just Google search the error code you get you will find plenty of links where you can download bootable disks/CD images to circumvent the problem in your BIOS.

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By InsaneScientist on 8/22/2007 4:18:06 AM , Rating: 3

SATA actually uses more power than PATA does.

Current serial standards are simple, require few interconnects, and faster than most of their parallel counterparts. The caveat is that they draw more power.

For example... The actual power required by the SATA bus in idle mode is around .5W, as opposed to PATA, which is more like .05W. ;)

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By Screwballl on 8/22/2007 9:41:18 AM , Rating: 2

wow you really have no clue.... SATA has a much lower power requirement of just 250 mV compared to PATA's 5-volt requirement. As for wattage, anyone knows that an almost identical items at a lower voltage will have a much lower wattage as well.

Watts = Volts x Amps
So if you have 5V x 2A = 10W
or if you have .250V x 2A = 0.5W
(above formula numbers used for example, not actual hard drive Amps/Watts)

so which is a higher wattage and power draw again?

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By TomZ on 8/22/2007 2:51:12 PM , Rating: 2

The SATA bus power calculation would have to follow the power dissipation equation used for charging and discharging a capacitance, e.g.:

P = C * V² * F

Where P is the calculated power (watts), C is the load and line capacitance (farads), V is the voltage, and F is the frequency.

The DC power dissipation you stated is not relevant for SATA or PATA, unless you know ahead of time that C*V*F = 2A in this case.

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By InsaneScientist on 8/23/2007 1:41:56 AM , Rating: 2

Sheesh... almost couldn't find the article I took that from. :)

Anyhoo...
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/13/flash_based...

Second paragraph on that page.

I know most people here aren't too fond of them (I'm not either), but it's kinda difficult to be biased on power requirements.

The actual figures are here: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/13/flash_based...

I would point out that just because something operates at a lower voltage does not mean that it draws less power, but someone seems to have beaten me to it. ;)

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By TomZ on 8/22/2007 2:41:13 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
SATA actually uses more power than PATA does. The actual power required by the SATA bus in idle mode is around .5W, as opposed to PATA, which is more like .05W.

Nah, worst case (full-speed) power dissipation is < 100mW, according to SATA PHY datasheets. Where are you getting 0.5W at idle figures from? What figure are you quoting for "active" (since HDDs channels are almost never idle unless the computer is off)?

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RE: :( ATA/IDE?

By InsaneScientist on 8/23/2007 1:46:38 AM , Rating: 2

I'm not quoting anything for active, since at that point, the power draw of the hard drive and the controller themselves far outweigh any power used by the bus.

As I said above, the figures came from here, second paragraph:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/13/flash_based...
and here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/13/flash_based...

You're right, hard drives are almost never completely idle. SSDs, on the other hand... ;)

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Holy !!!

By Shark Tek on 8/21/2007 9:15:18 PM , Rating: 3

Guys do you remember when 100GB was the biggest announcement for notebooks hard drives?

Pretty soon someone will be the first in reaching the 1TB goal.
I wonder, who is going to be the one.

RE: Holy !!!

By marsbound2024 on 8/21/2007 9:46:25 PM , Rating: 2

Fujitsu in 2010 apparently:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/08/fujitsu-will...
Original article by PC World:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135683-pg,1/arti...

I thought DailyTech had an article on this, but unfortunately DailyTech's search function isn't the best... I also wished I could browse older headlines more easily and across a longer period.

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RE: Holy !!!

By InsaneScientist on 8/22/2007 4:45:26 AM , Rating: 1

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8376

The PC World article is the original source for that one, too.

BTW... Dailytech's search feature may not be that great, but Google is. :)
To do a site specific search, type "site:wesbite-you-want-to-search" and then the search query after it.
I.E. To find that article, I typed this into google:
"site:dailytech.com Fujitsu Laptop HDD"

Try it! :)

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RE: Holy !!!

By Dactyl on 9/7/2007 5:37:47 PM , Rating: 2

I still remember when a 200GB 3.5" drive could be called "DRIVEZILLA" and 8MB of cache was "CAVIAR"

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Shock rating

By Azsen on 8/21/2007 11:15:27 PM , Rating: 2

How much exactly is 350G or 900G of shock? Is there any data around on this? E.g. 350G being equivalent to dropping the hard drive from 2 metres etc?

RE: Shock rating

By phaxmohdem on 8/21/2007 11:24:29 PM , Rating: 2

http://www.betterbuilt.com/data-recovery.aspx

Check the table at the bottom of the page... I haven't verified the accuracy of these numbers, so take it with a grain of salt and/or further research.

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