The diminutive 10GB and 20GB drives, announced Wednesday, will mean cavernous storage for a range of mobile-computing devices, including music players, personal digital assistants, wearable computers and even laptops. Their capacities are well above those of most gadget-sized devices, including Apple Computer's well-endowed new iPod.
Based on the design of the company's 2.5-inch notebook PC drives, the new 1.8-inch designs are smaller than a credit card in width and length and, at 5 millimeters and 8 millimeters, respectively, only slightly thicker than a credit card.
Most PDAs, such as Compaq Computer's iPaq, offer between 16MB and 64MB of internal storage in the form of flash memory or RAM and also can use external compact flash cards, such as Sony's Memory Stick, with capacities up to 1GB. IBM offers the 1-inch Microdrive, a tiny hard drive with capacities ranging from 170MB to 1GB. It is designed to fit inside the compact flash ports used by PDAs and other devices.
Larger hard drive-based music players and notebook PCs typically offer drives with capacities between 10GB and 40GB. New 60GB hard drives are just coming on the market for notebooks.
Toshiba says that its new drives, with tens of gigabytes on hand, will support manufacturers' desire to add more complex applications or more storage space for music or photos in new products.
Those manufacturers are likely to follow the example of Apple and its PDA-sized iPod portable music player, which uses a 5GB hard drive. Apple says the drive can store up to 1,000 songs and can also be used as a portable hard drive to store other files or transfer them between machines.
The new drives from Toshiba's Storage Systems Division should roughly double and quadruple those figures, though actual storage figures will depend on the device each drive is used for.
Toshiba said it would begin shipping the 10GB drive, dubbed the MK1003GAL, in February and the 20GB unit, known as the MK2003GAH, in March. The company did not announce pricing for the new drives.
