Toshiba Corp. on Tuesday introduced its new 2.5"/9.5mm hard disk drive (HDD) with 1TB capacity. The new drives utilize the latest-generation platters with industry-leading areal density and 500GB capacity.

Toshiba MQ01ABD hard drives are available in 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities and are based on 500GB platters with an industry-leading areal density of 744Gb/in² (Gb per square inch), a 37% increase compared to prior 2.5" models. The new platters bring both additional capacities as well as boost in data transfer speeds.

The new drives have 5400rpm spindle speed, 8MB cache and use Serial ATA-300 interface. Toshiba declares 1288.6Mb/s maximum media transfer rate as well as 12ms average seek time. The MQ01ABD-series HDDs have been engineered for superior energy efficiency: they consume only 0.55W during idle mode. The MQ01ABD drives also offer improved acoustic performance, emitting a maximum of 19dB at idle and 24dB during seek operations. 

The MQ01ABD drives are positioned for high-end notebook and desktop PCs, mobile workstations, gaming consoles, DVR set-top boxes, external storage solutions, and other applications requiring high-capacity and cost-effective storage. 

"Hard disk drives offer the best value for digital data storage by providing the highest combination of capacity, performance, cost and data reliability. The creation of rich content by consumers and businesses continues to push the demand for storage capacity.  The Toshiba MQ01ABD series provides not only the capacity and performance required by notebook and PC manufacturers, multimedia professionals, multi-room set-top-box  and other power users, but also the benefits of a low-power, environmentally friendly drive," said Joel Hagberg, vice president of product marketing of storage device division of Toshiba America Information Systems.

Mass production of the MQ01ABD series will start in the middle of August.

Tags: Toshiba, HDD