new toshiba disk drive
siliconstrategies.com
Tiny Toshiba drive blurs flash, disk boundary
by Rick Merritt, EETimes
Silicon Strategies
01/09/2004, 3:34 PM ET
LAS VEGAS -- Toshiba's storage device division announced plans for 2- and 4-Gbyte disk drives at the Consumer Electronics Show measuring just 0.85-inches across. The new sub-one-inch form factor blurs the boundaries between flash and hard-disk storage for mobile devices, but one senior design manager said the move could be a shrink too far.
At 3.3-mm by 24-mm by 32-mm, the Toshiba 0.85-inch drives are roughly the size of a small flash card and should be in mass production late this year. By that time, the first gigabyte flash cards, some based on new 512-Mbit flash chips, are expected to be on the market as well.
Toshiba expects to keep pushing capacity up on the tiny drives. The 2-Gbyte model uses one platter spinning at 3,600 rpms and one head. The 4-Gbyte model uses two heads. Both weigh less than 10 grams and are rated for 1,000 Gs of operating shock.
The drives are a quarter of the size of Toshiba's current 1.8-inch drive used in the Apple iPod. They are aimed at cellular phones, MP3 players, PDAs, digital still cameras and camcorders. The company did not announce pricing.
With the new products, Toshiba leapfrogs both Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' Microdrive and startup Cornice's one-inch hard drive. However, one senior engineer said the small drive may not be practical for many designs.
"The cost may be prohibitively high, about 30-40 percent above one-inch drives. There comes a point when it doesn't make sense to shrink any smaller due to areal density issues," said Sin Hui Cheah, a product planning manager who designs MP3 players for Thomson.
Thomson was one of the first large companies to adopt the one-inch Cornice drive. However, Cheah said most consumers prefer more capacity with a larger but lower cost device rather than pay a premium for a smaller device. "This [Toshiba drive] may represent one step too far, confining itself to a very small set of cellphones, PDAs or MP3 players," he said.
Cheah added that he expects to see MP3 players with 1-Gbyte of built-in flash hit the market later this year based on 512-Mbit flash chips. |
