Naturally, as laptops get thinner with each generation, storage suppliers are pushing the form factor envelope as well, making thinner drives while packing equal if not greater storage capacities. The storage arm of Toshiba revealed on Tuesday a new series of 2.5 inch hard drives measuring just 7 mm thick, the MQ02ABF series, perfect for Ultrabooks and super-slim notebooks.
"The MQ02ABF series fulfills our customers' desire for a high capacity 7 mm form factor HDD required for today's thin and light laptops," said Don Jeanette, senior director of product marketing at Toshiba's Storage Products Business Unit.
According to the specs, these new hard drives arrive with only two platters, a rigid chassis design, and dual stage head positioning technology. The drives connect via SATA 3 (6 Gb/s), have a 5,400 RPM rotational speed, and four read/write heads. Additional features include a 12 ms average seek time, a weight of 0.218 pounds, and a total measurement of 2.75 x 3.93 x 0.275 inches. The 1 TB drive is the MQ02ABF100 model; the 750 GB drive is the MQ02ABF075 model.
"We continue to focus on delivering a wide range of storage devices that enhance the computing experience, and we believe this newest addition to Toshiba's HDD product line will deliver the features our customers need," Jeanette added.
The new drives are likely to appear in lower cost notebooks, packing capacity rather than extreme performance. Toshiba said it will begin sampling these drives sometime in November.
