Toshiba’s storage division this week unleashed the world’s first 30GB and 60GB hard disk drives in 1.8” form-factor targeting mobile and consumer environments.

“We are delighted to announce the world's highest capacity 1.8-inch HDD,” said Amy Dalphy, manager, HDD business unit, Toshiba SDD.

Toshiba’s new HDDs – MK3006GAL and MK6006GAH – are equipped with 4200rpm motors, 2MB cache and are designed to work using Parallel ATA-100 protocol.

“We made improvements to push the capacity, increase shock resistance and to lower power consumption and noise. The resulting drives are perfect for integration in audio applications, such as mobile audio players, and mini-notebook PCs. We will continue to introduce high-capacity, small form factor HDD and contribute to making a reality of ubiquitous computing,” Mr. Dalphy added.

To achieve this industry-leading capacity, Toshiba has set a new milestone for areal density in the 1.8” HDD category at 93.5Gb per square inch. This has allowed Toshiba to pack 30GB of data onto a single 1.8” platter, an increase of 50% over current models, delivering drives that are ideally suited for in-demand consumer electronics products such as mobile audio players and mobile notebook PCs.

The key to setting a new areal density benchmark of 30GB on a single platter was the replacement of the Pico Sliders with Femto Sliders, Toshiba said. Femto Sliders are attached to the drive’s heads, and maintain the appropriate distance from the disk during read and write operations. The new Femto Sliders are 35% smaller and much lighter. Advances were also achieved in the thin-film technology for both the head and the platter.

Engineered to meet the stringent requirements for mobile devices such as MP3 players, handheld video players and handheld computers, Toshiba’s new 30GB (single platter) and 60GB (dual platter) HDDs offer operating shock tolerance of 500G and non-operating shock tolerance of 1500G through the employment of fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) motor technology. The drives' FDB motor also provides improved acoustics.

The 1.8-inch 30GB and 60GB HDDs will begin shipping in the fourth quarter 2004.