Toshiba has announced its first 7mm-high, two-platter laptop hard drive that can store up to 1TB of data.
Toshiba's MQ02ABF series 2.5-inch 5400rpm SATA hard drive is just under one-third of an inch thick and features a new "rigid chassis" design and dual-stage head positioning technology. The dual-head technology refers to the fact that each disk platter has two read/write heads rather than the more typical single-head drives.
The drive is available in 750GB and 1TB models and has an average data seek time of 12 milliseconds.
Toshiba's new two-platter, 7mm laptop drive.
"The MQ02ABF series fulfills our customers' desire for a high-capacity 7mm form factor HDD required for today's thin and light laptops," Don Jeanette, senior director of product marketing at Toshiba, said in a statement.
Most laptop drives are either 7mm or 9mm thick..
Toshiba is not the first to introduce a 1TB, ultra-thin laptop drive. In June, Western Digital introduced its WD Blue 1TB drive in a 7mm form factor.
In recent months, manufacturers have also been introducing even thinner laptop drives, albeit with less capacity.
In April, WD launched its 5mm-thick WD Blue hard disk drive and WD Black SSHD (solid-state hybrid drive), which combines NAND flash with traditional spinning disk.
WD's launch was followed by Seagate, which in September, unveiled a single-platter, 5mm-thick, 500GB hard drive.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.
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