The boffins at Toshiba have done it again, they’ve managed to squeeze more zeroes and ones onto a HDD through Discrete Track Recording (DTR) technology. Here’s the techie blurb and a pretty picture from Toshiba that for once made sense to me!

So what does this mean to you and me. Well for some reason DTR is best applied to small form factor HDDs, namely the 1.8 and 2.5 inch variations so it means more disk space for your iPod and laptop. Currently the 1.8 inch HDDs max out at 60 GB - Apple slap two of these platters together to make their 160 GB iPod - but with DTR the platters will reach a 120GB capacity allowing Apple to come out with a 240 GB iPod with the same physical size as the 120 GB model. Cool, eh?

1.8 inch HDDs are also used in other devices such mobile PCs, digital vid cams and car nav units, so their capacities should be increased as well. And for those of use who are keeping track of the score Toshiba now squeeze in 333 Gb per square inch on these new drives.

The downside? Well Toshiba doesn’t plan to start mass production of drives boasting the new DTR tech until 2009, so it’ll be a while before a bigger capapcity iPod appears, but at least it’s on the horizon.

Source: Toshiba

Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate, the well-known HDD manufacturer, ‘disclosed’ in an interview to the Wall Street Journal that the company intends producing solid state drives using flash memory next year. No surprises there really, with flash memory capacity increasing almost daily, it’ll soon be on a par with magnetic storage. Of course, flash memory storage is great for your laptop as its lighter and more importantly consumes less power than its positive and negative counterpart.

The thing that struck me as strange about the ‘disclosure’ from Bill was that Seagate already have a hydrid magnetic/flash drive available. Their absurdly named Momentus 5400 PSD already enables laptop users to have a 160 GB drive with the flash/magnetic storage combo.

Come on Bill tell us something we didn’t already know or couldn’t at least guess.

Source: enGadget

Hot news from the boys at Toshiba if you’re looking to squeeze more storage into your laptop without resorting to external methods. They’ve just announced the MK3252GSX, a 320GB 2.5 inch HDD that spins around at 5,400 rpm and is a mere 9.5 mm tall. The reduction in height means that this little sucker will fit neatly into super-slim laptops that require a smaller 2.5 inch HDD than their more portly brothers. Other spec include a 12ms seek time, 3Gbps interface speed and 8 MB of buffer memory. There’s also an optional Free Fall Sensor function to park the heads up once ‘freefall’ is detected.

Of course the big step forward with the MK3252GSX is the added capacity, admittedly blowing away the competition by only a mere 20 GB, but it does spin faster and will slide gracefully into an ultra-slim laptop. Apparently the extra storage is available because

The MK3252GSX uses an improved read-write head and enhanced magnetic layer to boost areal density and achieves a storage capacity of 320GB.

Anyway Toshiba will start knocking this big boy out around November time, so if you are thinking of investing in a new laptop and need plenty of storage it could be worth the wait.

Source: Toshiba

Hitachi announced on Thursday their latest addition to the Travelstar range of laptop hard drives. This new puppy gives you 200GB of storage space with Hitachi’s “Bulk Data Encryption”. According to Hitachi the encryption process uses a key to encrypt your files, so if you need to dispose of the hard drive securely, simply deleting the encryption key renders files unreadable. Check out the full skinny from Hitachi.

These new drives are already being used in Dell XPS and Alienware notebooks.

Source: engadget