Digital Trends

Toshiba has pushed 1.8-inch hard drives - the kind found in media players and ultra-portable notebooks - to the quarter-terabyte mark.

Toshiba has announced a significant expansion to its 1.8-inch hard drive line, adding the MKxx29GSG series of SATA drives, with the top model coming in with a whopping 250 GB of storage. The 1.8-inch HDD form factor is most-frequently seen in portable media players, camcorders, and ultra-portable computers, and significantly raises the bar for storage available to those devices.

"Portable PCs continue to make the transition to the SATA interface. IDC estimates that 84 percent of mobile HDD shipments in the second quarter of 2008 were SATA," said IDC research director John Rydning, in a statement. "Toshiba's implementation of SATA 3.0 GB/s for its new 1.8-inch HDD product line will facilitate adoption in a broad range of portable PC form factors."

Toshiba has recently hit 240 GB capacities in its 1.8-inch PATA drives.

The new SATA drives offer a 3 Gb/s interface, have an average seek time of 15ms, spin at 5,400 rpm, and sport 8 MB of onboard cache. They're also available in 120 and 160 GB capacities, and made advanced in power consumption, as defined by the unit's power draw divided by its formatted capacity. Under that measure, the 250 GB version offers a 43 percent improvement in energy consumption, pulling just 0.0016 watts per gigabyte. Toshiba has also reduced the number of hazardous substances used in the manufacture of its hard disk products, and completely removed hazardous halogens in this new drive series.