Toshiba's foray into 9.5mm thick 1TB netbook compatible drives
While 1TB 2.5″ drives have been around since 2009, the problem with them was that they were excessively thick and therefore had limited applications in the space-restrictive chasis of a netbook or even notebooks. Previously, high capacity 2.5″ hard drives normally came with a thickness of 12.5mm, making them a bit too bulky for netbooks. However, by trimming the thickness by 3.0mm, Western Digital and Toshiba have released a 9.5mm 2.5″ hard drive that have capacities up to 1TB.
In order to do this, the Western Digital Scorpio Blue and Toshiba MQ01ABD had to conform to the standard dual-platter design on 9.5mm hard drives, and they did this by upping the memory density per platter. Toshiba lists its areal density at 744GB per square inch to achieve a 500GB platter.
The Scorpio Blue is a SATA 2 drive with Advanced Format that is optimised for Windows 7, spins at 5200/5400rpm and costs USD$139. The MQ01ABD is also a SATA2 drive that spins at 5400RPM and will be available at the middle of August.
For official specs:
Toshiba:
Product Specifications
| Model Number | MQ01ABD100, 075, 050, 032, 025 | |||
| Maximum Capacity (Formatted) 1 | 1000//750 // 500/320/250 | |||
| Number of platters | 2 // 1 | |||
| Areal density (max) | 744.1Gb/in2 | |||
| Media transfer rate (max) | 1288.6Mbps | |||
| Average seek time | 12 ms | |||
| Rotational speed | 5400 RPM | |||
| Buffer memory | 8 MB | |||
| Interface | Serial ATA Revision 2.6 (ATA-8) | |||
| Interface transfer rate | 3Gb/s | |||
| External dimensions (WxDxH; mm) | 69.85 mm x 100.0 mm x 9.5 mm | |||
| Weight (g) | 112//102 g (typ) | |||
| Energy consumption efficiency **** | 0.00055/0.00074/0.0011/0.0018/0.0022 | |||
| Shock resistance: | ||||
| Operating | 3.920m/s2 (400G) 2ms | |||
| Non-operating | 8.820m/s2 (900G) 1ms | |||
| Acoustics: | ||||
| Idle | 23// 17 dB | |||
| Seek | 24// 19dB |
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