Toshiba, Samsung Make Tiny Drives Bigger

Toshiba and Samsung are packing more bits into portable drives, with Toshiba announcing a 320 GB 2.5-inch notebook drive and Samsung cramming 160 GB into a 1.8-inch drive.

Storage vendors Toshiba and Samsung continue to increase the capacities of hard disk drive systems designed to be used in notebook computers and in personal electronics like portable media players: Toshiba has announced a new 2.5-inch notebook hard drive which packs 320 GB of storage, while Samsung has announced a 1.8-inch hard drive with a 160 GB capacity.

First up, Toshiba’s new MKxx52GSX Series 2.5-inch hard drives (PDF) run at 5,400 rpm speeds and will be available in capacities ranging from 80 GB all the way to 320 GB. The drives sport an average seek time of 12 ms, offer 8 MB of onboard buffer memory, and use a 3 Gbps SATA interface; select models will also offer a free-fall sensor so systems can try to put off read and write operations until the unit has come to a full and complete stop. The company hasn’t released any information on when the drives will begin shipping to manufacturers, but word is that production will begin by the end of 2007. Toshiba also pushing the capacities of its 7,000rpm 2.5-inch notebook drives to 200 GB.

Notebook drives are great…but they don’t fit in a a camcorder or an iPod. That’s where Samsung’s new 1.8-inch hard drives make their play. Back in June, Samsung announced it would be offering its new SpinPoint N2 1.8-inch hard drives in capacities up to 120 GB; today, the company bumped that number up to 160 GB. The SpinPoint N2s run at 4,200 rpm, and Samsung is quick to point out that’s enough space for 40,000 typical MP3 files or 100 HD quality movies. Expect to see the drives appearing in camcorders—and maybe some top-of-the-line media players—in short order.