[NEWS] - Toshiba announces smallest HDD yet

[CougTek]

The 0.85 inch diameter disk is believed to be the world's smallest hard disk drive that can store about 2 or 3 gigabytes worth of information, company spokeswoman Midori Suzuki said Monday.

A 2-gigabyte hard disk drive can store about 30 hours of music but cannot store movie-length video, she said. Toshiba plans to start taking orders by the summer of next year to start mass production as early as 2005, she said.

Pricing has not been decided.

To be honest, I first spotted the news on Ars, but Hannibal didn't provide any link to the official announcement so I had to look elsewhere.

I'm not sure if solid state storage devices would be more appropriate for drives this small.

News source

 

[Mercutio]

How big are the discs in a microdrive? They can't be much bigger than that. Aren't there 2GB microdrives now?

 

[CougTek]

The world's smallest HDD is believed to be a 1 inch (2.54 centimeters) model from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi's U.S. unit.

Hitachi's microdrive is bigger. 1 inch versus 0.85 inch for the Tosh.