Chicago (IL) - Fujitsu will premiere the first 120 GByte harddrive for mobile applications later this week. The device offers low power consumption, a low noise level as well as a robust build quality, the manufacturer said. Fujitsu also announced small form factor serial attached SCSI drives.

The unit dubbed MHV2120AT will be unveiled and demonstrated during the Cebit tradeshow, which takes place in Hannover, Germany, from March 10 to 16. 120 GByte storage capacity is the next stage for notebooks that is initiated by Fujitsu and is likely to be soon adapted by other large harddrive manufacturers during the second quarter of this year.

Fujitsu believes that many notebook users request for the same capacity, features and reliability from their harddrive as they do from a desktop drive, since large amounts of data are carried along on business trips. The device consumes 1.6 watts during read and write processes and 0.5 watts when idle. The MHV2120AT can resist impacts of up to 900 Gs (8820 m/s2) when idle and up to 300 Gs (2940 m/s2) during operation. The drive also reaches up to 600,000 load/unload cycles.

The drive will ship to OEMs in May of this year. Fujitsu did not release specific performance and noise level data.

In a separate announcement, the company said it has begun shipping 2.5" small form factor (SFF) serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives. The first models are the MAV2036RC- und MAV2073RC units with a capacity of 36 and 73 GByte, respectively. The SFF SAS configuration allows a data transfer rate of up to 3 Gbit per second (375 MByte per second), consumes less power than comparable enterprise drives and posts a MTBF (mean time between failures) reliability of 1.4 million hours.

Pricing for the SAS drives is not yet available.