No mini-hard drives from Hitachi. Sort of.
Toshiba got a lot of people excited about their new nickel-sized 0.85-inch hard drives, and how they could start showing up in PDAs and cellphones (or just about anywhere else), but don't expect Hitachi to play catch-up and come out with a similarly sized mini-drive themselves. In an interview with PC World, Bill Healy, senior VP at Hitachi Global Storage Tecnologies, says that they're gonna stick with the one-inch sized Micro Drive and Flash memory, and that:
"Hitachi has looked at smaller hard-disk drives than 1-inch for some time. Our concern, and why we have not introduced a product, is first, our customers are saying the [1-inch] Micro Drive is the correct solution. Also, like everywhere, there is competition and the competition beneath the Micro Drive is flash memory and so we have to be very cautious of that with yet smaller hard drives."
He's wrong, of course, since we fully expect our next Treo to have a mini-hard drive in it, and from the sound of it, it's gonna be Toshiba that makes those drives.
