Toshiba Expands HDD Portfolio With New 3.5-Inch Drives

Toshiba's Storage Products division has officially re-entered the 3.5-inch HDD market with the launch of its new DT01ACA Desktop series. The new lineup is targeting the typical consumer desktop, AIOs, gaming rigs, home servers, external HDD enclosures, and other consumer electronics like set-top boxes and DVRs. It also features Toshiba's 1 terabyte-per-platter tech, offering capacities ranging from 500 GB to 3 TB.

The news arrives after Toshiba purchased part of Western Digital's 3.5-inch assets back in February 2012, allowing it to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for the desktop and consumer electronics markets. The acquisition also enhanced Toshiba's ability to manufacture and sell 3.5-inch hard drives for near-line (business critical) applications.

"Toshiba’s entrance into the desktop class hard drive market enhances our full product portfolio," said Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Toshiba’s Storage Products Business Unit. "We expect to continue to grow unit volume as Toshiba is uniquely positioned to support storage requirements from client to cloud computing."

According to the product listing, key features include a 7,200 RPM rotational speed, and low power consumption for cooler operation -- 6.4 watts read/write power, and 3.7 to 5.2 watts active idle power, depending on the capacity. Acoustics range from 25 dB to 20 dB, and all four models connect via a SATA 6 Gb/s interface. The 1 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB models feature 1, 2, and 3 platters respectively.

"With 64 MB cache buffer (1 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB models) the DT01ACA drives are designed for faster data processing," Toshiba said on Wednesday. "The drives include Advanced Sector Format technology, which utilizes the industry standard 4K byte-per-sector configuration and improved error-correcting code functionality to enhance data integrity while making more efficient use of the storage surface area."

Toshiba is now the third largest HDD maker, falling behind Seagate and Western Digital. The latter company purchased Hitachi GST earlier this year, but only did so after agreeing to sell off some of its 3.5-inch assets to Toshiba so it could land a regulatory approval for the Hitachi deal. Toshiba is also the third to release drives using 1 terabyte-per-platter technology, following behind Seagate and the former Hitachi GST.

The new 3.5-inch HDDs complement Toshiba’s broad family of HDD and solid state drive (SDD) solutions for desktop, client and enterprise markets, giving customers a one-stop shop for all their storage needs. The 2 and 3 TB 3.5-inch HDD models (DT01ACA200, DT01ACA300 respectively) will start shipping this month.

So far there's no word on when the 500 GB and 1 TB models will ship (DT01ACA050, DT01ACA100), so stay tuned.

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