Toshiba Reveals First 3.5 Hard Disk Drives in Years

From X-bit Labs: Toshiba Corp. has announced the launch of a family of advanced 3.5" hard disk drives for the first time in many years. The HDDs provide up to 3TB of capacity as well as 5700rpm, 5940rpm or 7200rpm spindle speeds. Volume shipments of the drives, produced with manufacturing equipment acquired in a recent transaction with Western Digital Corp., will start at the end of this month.

The high capacity storage devices that add to the performance of today's digital devices, among them desktop PCs, external hard drives, digital video drives and TVs with an integrated recording function, must match advances in HD image quality and the proliferation of TV channels and other digital sources with density advances that can meet increasingly heavy demands on capacity. Toshiba is making this possible with a new product line-up that includes 3.5" drives with up to 3TB capacity and technologies Toshiba inherited from WD and Hitachi GST.

The new line-up is configured to meet diverse needs. The DT01ACA-series offers a rotational speed of 7200rpm, appropriate for high performance desktop PCs. The DT01ACA***V-series drives are also equipped with a streaming function to handle data transfer within a specified time, and are optimized for applications such as digital video recorders that must record and playback video data without any delay. Toshiba DT01ABA hard drives feature Serial ATA 6Gb/s interface, 64MB cache and 1TB platters.

Toshiba has also responded to energy-conscious users with low power consumption DT01ABA and DT01ABA***V models offering rotational speeds of 5700rpm and 5940rpm; compared to the 7200rpm variants, these models reduce power consumption by 19 to 25%. Toshiba DT01ABA hard drives sport Serial ATA 6Gb/s interface, 32MB cache and 1TB platters.

Since the start of this fiscal year, as the result of a series of strategic investments that culminated in securing capabilities in 3.5 inch HDD for consumer products, Toshiba has realized the ability to develop and market hard disk drives in all key product areas. By complementing this with SSD solutions for both enterprise and consumer applications, Toshiba is uniquely positioned to meet demand across the entire range of customer needs.

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