Toshiba intros five capacious new 1.8-inch hard drives
By Evan Blass 
posted December 14th 2007 10:12AM
posted December 14th 2007 10:12AM
We're all for bulking up the storage in our notebooks and portable gear, so naturally we're quite thrilled that Toshiba has developed a quintet of new 1.8-inch PATA hard drives that promise higher capacity and better performance for the gadgets we hold so dear. Three of the drives offer up 60GB on a single platter: the 4,200 RPM MK6028GAL for laptops and UMPCs, along with the 4,200 RPM MK6014GAL with 2MB buffer and 3,200 RPM MK6015GAA with 160KB buffer, both of which employ so-called "long data sector" technology to bring "format efficiency, improved error correction capability and enhanced storage capacity" to portable consumer electronics devices, according to ol' Tosh. Also destined for lightweight PCs are the dual-platter 120GB MK1214GAH and single-platter 80GB MK8025GAL, both 4,200 RPM drives with 2MB and 8MB buffers, respectively. Expect the new models to start appearing in consumer products sometime early next year. [Warning: PDF link][Via Slashgear]
If It doesn't have SSD then it aint for me.
Thats a really bad viewpoint... you're saying that any UMPC is worthless without SSD? So you'd rather have a 16gb UMPC than a 120gb UMPC?
Personally, if i wanted a portable media player that held more than 8gb of music i'd rather a huge hunkin thing rocking a 500gb SATAII drive than a puny 60gb drive... it would probably be cheaper... and if i got mugged i would have something to fight back with.
Instead of making these drives larger for light computers, make them spin faster or replace with SSD. 4200 RPM is not for computing...iPods only. I returned a beautiful Sony Vaio TZ150 because of the 3-4 minute startup with Vista (this is after I removed all bloatware).
You should have upgraded Vista to Windows XP Pro. Your startup times would have been much faster. Don't blame the drive, blame the Vista.
I did switch to XP, but I bought a new computer to use with a new operating system (i.e. Vista). Needless to say, the startup time was cut to 45secs to 1 minute with an SSD version. Long story short, I return both (too much $$$) and bought a Macbook with a 30-40 second startup for less than half the price of the Sony (and it runs Vista reasonably). I am happy, but when SSD amounts go down I will revert back to Sony's TZ. :)
When I can I try one of these out in my $80 zune?
"Capacious" Try using it in a sentence today.
I use 15k RPM 2.5inch SAS drives (raid 0) for Vista 64 and it starts up in < 12 seconds. Spindle speed still has a huge impact with < 2ms access times. Still, shrinking drive size for increased mobility and decreased power consumption entirly has its place in that market.