Toshiba To Hike Tiny Drives To 10GB

Toshiba announced plans Thursday to boost the capacity of its ultra-small .85-inch hard disk drives to 10GB, giving even greater storage space for future small form-factor gadgets including digital music players and miniature automobile GPS systems.

Toshiba's Storage Device Division spilled the plans at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), currently underway in Las Vegas, where it also debuted a 4GB .85-inch drive, now the holder of the capacity record for the small-sized devices.

The company will shift its perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology onto the .85-inch platform in order to achieve greater data densities, executives said.

"Today's consumer electronics products demand big muscle in a small package, and 0.85-inch [drives] with increased capacity are completely altering the capabilities of devices," said Scott Maccabe, general manager of the storage group, in a statement from CES.

In August, 2005, Toshiba beat rivals Hitachi and Seagate by first introducing PMR on production drives; the technology currently is in use on Toshiba's 1.8-inch models.