Sure, solid state disks are all the rage these days. They’re often faster than hard disk drives and because they have no moving parts they’re more durable. But they’re also much more expensive, which is why you don’t see an awful lot of terabyte or larger SSDs. Meanwhile it looks like there’s still room for innovation and growth (or rather, shrinkage) in the traditional hard drive space.

This week Toshiba introduced a new hard drive that can pack up to 1TB of storage capacity into a 2.5 inch design. In other words, you should be able to slip the drive into a standard laptop disk bay.

The Toshiba MQ01ABD series hard drives will also be available in 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, and 750GB models, but it’s the top of the line model which is most impressive since it packs a ridiculously large amount of storage into such a small space. Although the way things are going, I suspect we’ll be measuring data in petabytes or exabytes in a few years and even this drive will look quaint.

Toshiba’s new drives are 5400RPM disks with average seek speeds of 12ms, 8MB of cache, and SATA 3.0 Gbps interfaces. You can find more specs below.

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2 replies on “Toshiba introduces a 1TB 2.5 inch hard drive”

  1. VERY BAD DISCs 2BGUTOAJVZYP__ AND 2BGUTOAJVZYQ__ AND MORE. THAT CAME IN LAPTOPS.

  2. It’s not so much the capacity but the thickness of the drive that has limited 2.5″ drives up till now.  Western Digital came out with a 2.5″ 1TB drive back in July of 2009 for example but the drive was 12.5mm thick.  Too many platters make it too thick to fit in many laptops but 9.5mm should make this one fit most models.

    They’ll need to get it down to 7mm to start fitting some of the thinner systems out there though.

    Meanwhile desktop 3.5″ drives are reaching 3TB but at that capacity we have to start worrying about system compatibility.  While the industry has been slow to develop any fixes even though they are fully aware of the problem we’ll start facing once 3TB on up capacities start coming into use.

    So it’s recommended to stick to no higher than 2TB for the time being until they get everything worked out for those higher capacity drives.

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