Toshiba’s Storage Device Division is displaying design concepts for devices that could be built based with its 0.85-inch hard disk drive at CeBIT 2004 in Hannover, Germany. Reportedly, the 0.85-inch drives will have a capacity of 2 to 4 Gigabytes and begin quantity shipment in the third or fourth quarter of 2004.
To put 0.85-inch hard drives in perspective, think about products currently on the market. The
Apple iPod mini contains a 1-inch
Hitachi 4GB MicroDrive which is embedded in a CompactFlash card. The Toshiba 0.85-inch drive is 15 percent smaller and can be built into commesurately smaller devices, particularly if the drive is not packaged as a CompactFlash card. The specifications indicate that Toshiba is awfully close to the size that they would need to be in order to fit in an SD card.
Toshiba’s concepts include a Multimedia Eyeglasses that have an embedded heads-up display, a Wristwatch PDA with a high definition capabilities, a Digital Wallet/Data Key, and an MP3 Headset. [ image courtesy of Toshiba ]