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Toshiba Squeezes Storage Down to Size

New Type II PC card can store up to 5 GB of data, and can still fit in a shirt pocket.

Martyn Williams, IDG News Service

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Toshiba has managed to squeeze a 5 GB hard disk drive into a Type II PC Card--a development that will be welcomed by road warriors and users of portable digital multimedia devices everywhere.

The new card, the PAMHD005, will go on sale in Japan on July 19 and is expected to retail for about $400. It has a single 1.8-inch platter, a two-head drive with rotational speed of 3,990 rpm (revolutions per minute), an average seek time of 15 milliseconds, and a data transfer rate of 5.2 MB per second.

Toshiba said it has plans to sell the hard disk drive outside Japan but has yet to decide when it will do so.

At 5 GB, the drive has greater capacity than a DVD-Video disc, which can hold 4.7 GB of data, and it can store five times as much data as IBM's 1 GB Microdrive. The Microdrive is less than half the size of Toshiba's new drive, fitting into a Compact Flash card, but either fits easily in a shirt pocket. Toshiba's PC Card weighs in at almost two ounces, while the Microdrive weighs just half an ounce.

Most other PC Card hard disk drives have required a Type III slot, so in most cases they occupy both Type II slots on a notebook. Toshiba's new drive takes up just one of those slots. Last year, Toshiba began selling a 2 GB hard disk drive for a Type II slot.

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