Soon to arrive in a portable media player near you, Toshiba’s Storage Devices division has rolled out new 5,400 rpm 1.8-inch hard disk drives (PDF) with micro-SATA connectors and capacities of 80 and 120 GB. The 80 GB MK8016GSG and 120 GB MK1216GSG leverage Toshiba’s 2.5-inch hard disk drive line, and offer meet the SATA 2.6 specification with a standard micro-SATA connector. They also offer performance figures normally reserved for drives meant for notebooks and portable PCs (8 MB cache, 489 Mbit/s transfer rate, 15 ms average seek time) with low power consumption (0.00375 W/GB for the 120 GB model, 0.00563 W/GB for the 80 GB model).
“The portable computing market is looking for an uncompromised computing experience in small and light-weight storage solutions,” said Toshiba Storage’s VP of marketing Maciek Brzeski, in a statement. “With enhanced features for the mobile environment, these new 1.8-inch HDDs enable mobile system manufacturers to reap the benefits of high-capacity magnetic storage, along with better power efficiency and ruggedness.”
That ruggedness reference? Toshiba says the drives can handle up to 500 Gs while operating, and 1,500 Gs if not operating. Toshiba hasn’t offered any pricing information on the drives, but you can expect them to start showing up in media players and even sub-notebook computers before long.
