Sunnyvale (CA) - If you considered the impact of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) on hard drives, as rather negligible so Fujitsu's announcement this morning may change your opinion: The company said it will begin shipping monstrous 250 GB and 300 GB notebook hard drives in the first quarter of 2007.

PMR has been around for more than a year, but the actual products resulting from this technology can easily be considered to lag behind initial projections of the major hard drive manufacturers. Perhaps with the exception of Seagate's 750 GB 3.5" drive, capacities have not been expanded as quickly as some may have thought and it appears that the leading hard drive developers are waiting for the others to catch up, before new models will be rolled out.

Fujitsu today mad a bold announcement, promising a 250 GB and a 300 GB notebook hard drive for the first quarter of 2007. The new 2.5" flagship drive will offer about three times the capacity of what you get in you mainstream notebook today, almost twice of the space of Seagate's high-end 160 GB drive and 50% more than the currently largest notebook hard drives (200 GB), which are currently sold by Toshiba and Fujitsu.

The company claims that this second generation PMR drive uses less power (1.6 watt) than any other PMR notebook drive available today, though this feature can be attributed at least partially to the low platter rotations peed of 4200 rpm. The "MHX2300BT" is purely aimed at applications that need maximum storage capacity in space constrained areas. While features such as Native Command Queuing are supported, performance appears not be the focus of the drive, which will be available in SATA 2.5 and ATA-8 versions.

Related article:
Toshiba fires up 200 GB perpendicular notebook hard drive
Toshiba intros 1.8" 100 GB hard drive