Toshiba Develops World's Smallest Hard Drive

Toshiba has announced what could very well be the world's tiniest hard disk drive with a form factor of a mere .85 inches and weight less than a third of one ounce.

The drive is expected to boost the storage capacity of consumer products such as mobile phones and PDAs, portable music players, digital cameras, as well as external storage devices.

Initial plans call for capacities of between 2 to 4 gigabytes, with higher density storage in the works. Toshiba will begin sampling the media prior to dedicating itself to mass production in late 2004. The company's goal is to produce a volume of 200,000 to 300,000.

"Hard disk drive technology has migrated from the computer to digital music players to mobile phones and other portable gadgets that require meaningful storage capacities in a pocket-size form factor," said Amy Dalphy, manager, HDD business unit at Toshiba SDD.

Dalphy continued, "Toshiba continues to lead and enable the market by expanding storage possibilities with gigabytes of capacity packed into a tiny hard disk drive that fits on your fingertip."

Toshiba faces competition by other vendors such as Hitachi, which won a contract to produce the 4 GB drive at the heart of Apple's new iPod mini. Aside from its dealings with Apple, Hitachi also produces the drives for the Dell DJ music player.

Hitachi purchased its hard drive business from IBM, which developed a 1-inch miniaturized drive during the 1990's.