The Diminutive
Toshiba Hard Drive

The Toshiba Hard Drive is made by Toshiba Corporation, which is a big Japanese electronics manufacturer. Founded in 1939, it has since become much involved in the production of digital memory. Though it has had more experience in RAM and Flash memory, it has also been manufacturing Hard Disk Drives for many years. Though Toshiba's hard drives come with some extra features when they are manufacturer installed inside of a Toshiba PC, they also work quite well in other systems, or as an external hard drive.

Unlike all the other main hard drive manufacturers, Toshiba does not seem to be racing to increase their drive capacity. Instead they seem to be focusing on the laptop hard drive market. This is evident by the fact that one of their most popular hard drives is their unique 1.8 inch hard drive. In fact, Toshiba has shipped over 1 Billion 1.8 inch hard drives since 2000! What makes this little Toshiba hard drive so popular? Definitely not its 120 GB capacity, so it must be the physical size. Though many people are looking for the biggest hard drive available for their desktop needs, there is also an increasing demand for more compact and portable disk drives. So much so, that in 2004, Toshiba introduced a 0.85 inch microdrive. These microdrives are seeing limited use in small electronics such as: digital cameras, Ipods, mobile phones, and mp3 players.

The 1.8 inch Toshiba hard drive however, is exceedingly more popular. All the other main hard disk drive manufacturers are now manufacturing their version of the 1.8 inch hard drive. Toshiba's 1.8 inch drives however, are still the most popular. One reason is that Toshiba has the most experience in building these drives. Toshiba was first when it came out with its 1.8 inch hard drive in 2000. That is: 4 years before Maxtor, 6 years before Hitachi, 7 years before Seagate, and 8 years before Western Digital! With vastly more experience than any other 1.8 inch hard drive manufacturer, Toshiba has made its 1.8 inch disks more reliable. Toshiba's 1.8 inch hard drives were also the first to implement Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, enabling 120 GB of media to be fit on 2 platters with an amazing density of 155.3 gigabits per square inch!

Despite its size, the 1.8 inch Toshiba hard drive is comparable in speed to other 5,400 rpm hard drives, with its average seek-time of 15 milliseconds being only 3 milliseconds longer than the average seek-time of 120 GB 3.5 inch hard drives. So the 1.8 inch drive has a huge advantage with it being so small. However there are a couple of problems with it. The first, as mentioned above, is its small capacity: 80 or 120 GB. The other is that when something goes wrong with it, its sheer physical smallness makes it harder to recover the data from it. This generally results in higher data recovery costs than those for a standard 3.5 inch hard drive. The 1.8 inch hard drive also provides improved shock tolerance over best-in-class 2.5 inch hard drives by more than 100Gs during operation and several hundred Gs in non-operating mode, making them ideal for highly mobile PC users.

Though Toshiba is well known for its 1.8 inch hard drives, they also manufacture a lot of 2.5 inch hard drives. These drives are ideal for mobile PC users who are willing to trade a little bit of ruggedness for a little more capacity. With up to 320 GB capacity at 200.1 gigabits per square inch, achieved by perpendicular magnetic recording, the 2.5 inch has the industry's largest density available! On top of that it features an 8 MB cache, not too large but sufficient to handle the drive's whopping 759 MB/second transfer rate, an amazing rate for any hard drive, and especially so for such a small hard drive! On top of that, these little drives boast a 12 millisecond average seek time, which they achieve by their 5,400 rpm. Even the exceedingly popular Western Digital 500 GB Raptor has only been able to achieve this average seek time speed by a noisy 10,000 rpm. All this to say, neither Toshiba's 1.8 inch, nor its 2.5 inch hard drive is crippled by its size. If you want a large capacity drive for your home or office computers, look for a Seagate, Hitachi or a Western Digital. But if you want something small, portable, rugged, yet competent, a drive that you can rely on to take you through life's bumps and jolts without losing your data, a Toshiba hard drive will exceed your mobile needs.

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