Toshiba Crams 1TB of HDD Storage into a Notebook Friendly 9.5mm Frame

Posted 08/02/2011 at 9:02am | by Paul Lilly

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Toshiba this week announced its first 2.5-inch hard drive series to offer up to 1TB of storage in the industry standard 9.5mm high form factor. The company's new MQ01ABD series uses 500GB platter technology and is available in capacities ranging from 1TB down to 250GB. This isn't the first drive to offer 1TB in a standard notebook form factor, but according to Toshiba, its flagship mobile HDD offers an industry leading areal density of 744Gb/in2, an increase in the quantity of data stored per square inch by over 37 percent compared to prior 2.5-inch models.

Toshiba's pitching the MQ01ABD series at high-end notebook users and even desktop PCs, mobile workstations, consoles, DVR set-top boxes, external storage solutions, and other applications that require large amounts of storage. In other words, Toshiba thinks it's the ideal drive for pretty much everyone, form factor be damned (many cases will require an adapter if you plan on picking this over a 3.5-inch desktop drive).

Sadly, the drive spins at just 5400RPM and carries 8MB of cache, which are two more reasons why you shouldn't plop this into a high-end desktop PC, or even a performance oriented notebook. Other features include a SATA 3Gbps interface, 12ms average seek time, and low acoustics (24dB or less in seek mode, 19dB or less when idle).

Toshiba will begin mass producing the MQ01ABD series later this month. No details on price.

Image Credit: Toshiba via BusinessWire