Toshiba Intros 2.5-inch 7mm 7,278rpm Hard Drives

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Here's a super-thin hard drive for super-thin notebooks.

Tokyo-based Toshiba Corp. said it has expanded its family of small form factor 2.5 inch hard drives with a new series scheduled to ship on August 30, the MQ01ACF series. This will be the company's first 7,278 RPM, 2.5 inch product with a 7 mm height, and will be served up in two capacities: 320 GB (MQ01ACF032) and 500 GB (MQ01ACF050).

"A maximum internal transfer rate of 1,850 Mbit/s is realized by improvement to linear recording density and the 7,278 RPM rotational speed," the company said. "Implementation of the 6 Gbit/s SATA interface also boosts data transfer rates over those of current models."

According to the specs, both models will have a 4.13 ms average latency time, a 12 ms average seek time, a 2 ms track to track seek time, and a 22 ms maximum seek time. The LBA for the 500 GB model will be 976,773,168 whereas the LBA for the 320 GB model will be 625,142,448. The overall dimensions for both will be 69.85 x 100.0 x 7 mm, making these drives great for laptops and super-thin Ultrabooks.

The specs also show that the drives will be RoHS compatible, and have a buffer size of 16 MiB. The HOST bytes per sector will be 512 byte, the DISK bytes per sector will be 4,096 byte, and the load/unload reliability will be 600,000 times. Power consumption will range from 0.8 watts (low-power idle) to 5.5 watts maximum (start), and the noise level will range from 24dB (seek) to 23dB (idle average). Both will be compatible with SATA 2 and older interfaces.

Toshiba did not provide pricing for the two drives, so stay tuned.

Kevin Parrish
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9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • apache_lives
    hdd performance is simple - its either an SSD, or its NOT

    this is not an ssd, it has the same performance field of any other modern 2.5 inch drive

    if its more expensive then a regular mechanical drive, then its not worth it
    Reply
  • amdfangirl
    Is that extra 78 rpm just a marketing ploy to make it look faster?

    Reply
  • daglesj
    I'd rather get the slim 500GB Seagate hybrids. I've been pretty impressed by them so far.

    I've pulled too many failing Toshiba 2.5" drives from laptops than I care to remember.
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere
    11419034 said:
    hdd performance is simple - its either an SSD, or its NOT

    this is not an ssd, it has the same performance field of any other modern 2.5 inch drive

    if its more expensive then a regular mechanical drive, then its not worth it

    Not really, there is a reasonable difference between 5xxx RPM drives and 72xxx RPM ones. But within those classes, less so.

    I'm guessing that the extra 78 RPM is either a marketing ploy, or it rounds more nicely somewhere.
    Reply
  • nukemaster
    11419173 said:
    Is that extra 78 rpm just a marketing ploy to make it look faster?
    Marketing for sure. is is just over 1% difference so would not exactly be ground breaking.
    Reply
  • jarred125
    Not that I am trying to say this is great innovation or anything, but the fact that it is a 7mm drive means it can be fit into thin laptops where 9mm can't. The smaller Dell Latitudes require 7mm, and I believe most of those drives are 5400 RPM.
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere
    Seagate makes Momentus Thin drives, and Hitachi has had them for a year and a half: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20120221231105_Hitachi_Unwraps_World_s_Thinnest_500GB_7200rpm_Hard_Drive.html
    Reply
  • lamorpa
    11419034 said:
    hdd performance is simple - its either an SSD, or its NOT

    this is not an ssd, it has the same performance field of any other modern 2.5 inch drive

    if its more expensive then a regular mechanical drive, then its not worth it
    Why would a HDD first be more expensive and then later be a regular mechanical drive? That makes no sense. It would somehow change because of the expense?
    Reply
  • jarred125
    Not that I am trying to say this is great innovation or anything, but the fact that it is a 7mm drive means it can be fit into thin laptops where 9mm can't. The smaller Dell Latitudes require 7mm, and I believe most of those drives are 5400 RPM.
    Reply