Fujitsu announced a new family of low-profile (9.5mm high) 2.5-inch hard disk drives, which is now called MHS. The data density per platter reached 53.2GB/sq.inch, which is about 30GB per 2.5-inch platter. It is not for nothing that Fujitsu focused on the "hard babies": now they have to maintain their leadership in this field anyway. Besides, this is a pretty profitable business. Though if the notebook prices will keep going down like that, the mobile HDDs will also stop bringing too high revenues to their makers one day. The last hope rests with the non-computer application for these solutions.

The spindle rotation speed of the new drives is traditional for Fujitsu solutions like that: 4,200rpm. Of course, there are 2.5 drives with faster rotating spindles: 5,400rpm from Toshiba, or IBM (see this news story). However, no one is using 30GB platters yet, and the capacity is far not the last important parameter for a hard disk drive. Especially in case of mobile systems, where the performance is not the No.1 priority.

The family includes 60GB. 40GB and 30GB HDDs. They support Ultra ATA/100 interface. The average seek time is 12ms. The drives construction is based on FDB (Fluid Dynamic Bearings), which reduce the noise level significantly. The official press-release doesn’t say anything about the cache-buffer size, but it is most likely to remain the same: 2MB. The price of the drives, which are said to start shipping "soon", hasn’t been yet announced as well.