Toshiba's New HDD Will Store Up To 45,000 Digital Photos

Talk about a brag book.

Toshiba is releasing a new line of credit card-thin hard disk drives, with up to 160GB of capacity — enough to store upwards of 45,000 digital photos, 42,000 digital music files or 130 digital videos. The smallest is 60GB - remember how just a few years ago, 1GB seemed like unending storage space?

The MKxx34GAL family are 1.8-inch, single-platter hard disk drives and Toshiba claims they will have the "best power consumption efficiency, most durability and quietest seek operation of any HDD on the market." In other words, they'll use less energy, handle drops and dings and bumps and bruises better and operate more quietly than anyone else.

The HDD's "ruggedness and durability" should tolerate up to 1,500G of shock when it's not in operation and 600G when it is. The size of the HDDs isn't new - Toshiba's shipped more than 70 million since 2000 and rules the market in the size. Toshiba quoted industry analyst firm IDC as saying it held 68 percent of the market in the size in the second quarter of 2009.

The specs:
Model Number: MXX34GAL
Maximum Capacity: 160GB / 120GB // 80GB / 60GB (Formatted)
Number of platters: 1
Areal density: 467 Gb/in(2)
Average seek time: 15 ms
Rotational speed: 4,200 RPM
Buffer memory: 8 MB
Interface Parallel: ATA
Interface transfer: 100 MB/sec rate
External dimensions: 54.0 mm x 71.0 mm x 5.0 mm
(WxDxH; mm)
Weight: 48 g (max)
Energy consumption efficiency: 0.0019 / 0.0025 // 0.0038 / 0.0050 W/GB
Shock resistance:
• Operating 5,880 m/s(2) (600 G, 2ms)
• Non-operating 14,700 m/s(2) (1,500 G, 1ms)
Acoustics:
• Idle 14 dB
• Seek 15 dB
Tags:  HDD, Storage, Toshiba