News for "1.8"

Toshiba Corporation, the industry pioneer in small form factor hard disk drives (HDDs), today introduced a new line of 1.8-inch HDDs with a capacity of up to 160GB on a single-platter, and a slim five-millimeter high profile targeting next-generation portable media players, digital video cameras and other consumer electronics products.

With an areal density of 723 Mbit/mm² (467 Gb per square inch), the industry's highest, Toshiba's new MK1634GAL family of 1.8-inch HDDs offers consumer electronics manufacturers a thin and light package with the industry's largest storage capacity, best power consumption efficiency, highest durability and quietest seek operation of any HDDs on the market.

Strengthening its line up of portable 1.8-inch hard drives for external use, Samsung today announced its 250 Gigabyte (GB) 1.8-inch hard disk drive, the Spinpoint N3U which incorporates a native USB 2.0 controller on its printed circuit board. Most external hard drives require the addition of a bridge circuit board to convert the hard drive's current interface into a USB interface. Samsung's N3U drive, however, uses a native USB interface and as such does not require this bridge board. This optimized design results in a smaller foot print, less power consumption and optimized performance, which is ideal for portable external storage devices. The N3U 1.8-inch drive consumes about 40 percent less power than a normal 2.5-inch hard drive of an equivalent capacity. It has two 125 GB platters for a total of 250 GB data storage capacity. The Spinpoint N3U also comes in 120 GB, 160 GB, and 200 GB capacities, the disk rotation speed is 3600 rpm. The drives are equipped with an 8 MB of cache memory. Initial shipments to OEMs are scheduled from mid-July with a MSRP of $199.00.


Source: NewsWire

MSI is said to be readying a custom graphics card called the N260GTX Lightning, based on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 GPU. There is currently no word on clock speeds but one would expect this card to come factory overclocked. The graphics card has a custom red PCB, featuring 8+2 phase power, 5000 hour capacitors, 1792 MB of GDDR3, D-Sub, DVI and DisplayPort or HDMI and a dual slot, dual fan cooler, featuring 5 heatpipes. MSI will also be bundling an AirForce panel which appears to allow on the fly adjustments to core and memory voltage, core, shader and memory clock speeds, as well as profile selection and brightness and contrast adjustments. The MSI N260GTX Lightning is expected to make its first official appearance at CeBIT 2009.


Sources: TechConnect , Matbe

Personal storage expert Plextor unveils the first truly pocket-sized external hard disk - one of the smallest 1.8-inch drives in the world. Weighing just 90g, this miniature device enables home users and business users to carry and share important data with them anywhere.
Perfect for PC and Mac users who find memory sticks too limiting, yet don't want the bulk of a full-sized external drive, the Plextor Pocket HDDs are only about the size of three memory sticks, yet offer much larger capacities - up to 120GB of storage. Plextor's pocket HDDs come in two sizes, the 60GB PX-PPH60U and the 120GB PX-PPH120U.

In addition to the new LGA 775 processors, Intel is preparing price cuts for its solid state drives. Intel's super fast 2.5-inch 80GB multi-level cell (MLC) X25-M SSDs - and its 80GB 1.8-inch X18-M counterpart - will drop from $600 to $525 on November 30th. On the very same day Intel will also introduce its new single-level cell (SLC) high-performance 32GB X25-E SSD for $700. A month later on December 28th, the price of this drive will already be dropped to $575. In the first half of 2009, Intel will be migrating to higher density, releasing 160GB variants of the X25-M/X18-M MLC SSDs priced at $990, and 64GB versions of the high-performance X25-E SLC SSDs priced again at $990.

Source: DailyTech

Toshiba Corporation, the industry pioneer in small form factor hard disk drives (HDDs), today announced expansion of its market-leading 1.8-inch lineup with three new high-capacity, high-performance Serial ATA HDDs for mobile PC applications, including the industry's first 250GB) 1.8-inch HDD. Toshiba's third-generation 5,400 RPM SATA 1.8 HDD family also features 120GB and 160GB capacities, along with the throughput power of the SATA 3.0Gb/s interface. In addition, the new series includes Toshiba's state-of-the-art free fall sensor option, which enhances protection from external shock and vibration events by responding to drops as low as five inches in height.

Toshiba Storage Device Division (SDD), the pioneer in small form factor hard disk drives (HDDs), today announced the world's first dual-platter 240GB(1) (MK2431GAH) and single-platter 120GB (MKxx31GAL series) 1.8-inch HDDs for integration into portable media players, camcorders and compact ultra-mobile PCs for the holiday shopping season. The new MKxx31GAL series also includes an 80GB capacity offering, rounding out the most complete line of high-capacity 4,200 RPM 1.8-inch HDDs for consumer electronics (CE) and mobile PC system manufacturers.

Toshiba's two new Parallel ATA HDD families feature the industry's highest areal density at 344 gigabits-per-square-inch, using fourth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, which was first introduced and commercialized by Toshiba in 2005. Toshiba's technology leadership in PMR has enabled the company to consistently deliver leading-edge capacities in the 1.8-inch form factor to support growing demand for the miniaturization of mobile devices to run digital video, photo, audio and computing applications.

The Korean semiconductor giant says that it will begin mass-producing 1.8" and 2.5" Solid-state drives (SSDs) for use by the mobile-computing industry. With the scale at which Samsung claim they're producing these parts, they hope to sell the parts at very competitive prices. This indicates a full-on reach of the SSD into consumer strata and of SSD becomming mainstream.

The Multi-Level Cell (MLC) drives slated for production feature 70 MB/s of write and 90 MB/s of read speeds, that's below what a single level cell (SLC) drive can offer, read speeds of 130 MB/s, an important specification to look out for when in the market for an SSD.

Samsung claims that the 128 GB SSD, which is built from 64 MLC NAND flash memory chips of 16 Gb (2 GB) each, is energy efficient at 0.2 W in standby mode and 0.5 W in active mode. Samsung claims the drive's expected life to be over 20 times that of conventional drives....80~100 years if a conventional drive lasts 5 years.


Source: TG Daily

Toshiba's Storage Device Division (SDD) launched today the industry's highest-capacity 160GB Serial ATA (1.5Gb/s) 1.8-inch HDDs. The new 5400 rpm hard drives come in single-platter 80GB (MK8017GAS) and dual-platter 160GB (MK1617GSG) models, delivering market-leading capacity, high-performance and compact size for space-efficient mobile PC systems. Toshiba's new 80GB and 160GB HDDs will ship to PC manufacturers and distribution partners in August 2008.