Fujitsu has squeezed a notch more capacity into its 2.5-inch, 5,400rpm mobile drives, announcing its MHZ2 BH family with a maximum capacity of 320GB on Tuesday.
A mainstream Fujitsu 2.5-inch hard drive for mobile or compact PCs
(Credit: Fujitsu)
The family is designed for use in mobile or compact PCs and in consumer electronics products. It also features 8MB of buffer, a 3 gigabit-per-second SATA interface, and power consumption of 1.9 watts when reading or writing data.
Hard drive manufacturers have been pushing to increase drive capacity over the last few years in order to keep up with flash memory.
"We need to maintain that 40 percent areal-density growth rate, at a minimum, to stay ahead of flash," Mark Kryder, chief technology officer at Seagate, told ZDNet Australia sister site CNET News.com in August of 2006.
Flash memory is more reliable and consumes less energy, but it costs more, in terms of cents per gigabyte.
Successive years of hardware size reduction has led the magnetic grains that record binary to shrink to the scale of hundreds of atoms, or about 8 nanometres long. (A nanometre is a billionth of a metre.
However Kryder notes that we have not reached the limit yet, "we are three orders of magnitude from any truly fundamental limits," he said.
The new drive will be available in February; but Fujitsu hasn't release pricing. The earlier MHY2 BH line topped out at 250GB and had a slower 1.5Gbps SATA (serial ATA) interface.
