200 GB Per Disk: Toshiba Leads 2.5" Hard Drive Storage Density

Irvine (CA) - Toshiba has upgraded its 2.5" hard drive series with a new 400 GB model. The total capacity is 20% less than what Toshiba’s rivals are currently offering, but Toshiba has the edge in terms of storage density : While the 500 GB 2.5" drives use three 167 GB disks, Toshiba achieves 400 GB with just two 200 GB disks. These are impressive numbers if we are considering the fact that 200 GB per disk was widely used in 3.5" drives just last year.

Toshiba’s announcement is yet another indication that hard drives may remain the mainstream storage technology of choice for several years. Perpendicular magnetic recording appears to have enough room to fend off the advances of flash memory and SSD devices with more storage capacity for the price. Toshiba is now offering a 200 GB-per-disk 5400 rpm hard drive that is limited to 400 GB, but easily could expand to 600 GB, which is about the mainstream storage capacity offered in today’s mainstream desktop PCs. Toshiba also announced a 7200 rpm 320 GB drive.

Samsung, Hitachi and Fujitsu have been offering 500 GB hard drives for some time now. These 5400 rpm drives (Fujitsu : 4200 rpm) however are limited to 167 GB per disk. Toshiba 200 GB disks are the first to break the 300 GB per square inch density barrier in the 2.5" space (308 Gb per square inch).

The manufacturer claims that the new hard drives are nearly inaudible during seek operations, which could make the drive an interesting choice for home entertainment solutions.

Pricing has not been announced. Volume production of the drives is expected to begin in September.