Toshiba announces 750GB and 1TB laptop HDDs, gives them awkward model names like MK7559GSXP
By Vlad Savov 
posted March 25th 2010 6:55AM
posted March 25th 2010 6:55AM
Time for us to welcome the world's most capacious 9.5mm-tall hard drive, the 750GB MK7559GSXP. Yeah, it's quite a mouthful, but then it's not every day that you come across a storage disk that packs data quite so tightly, so maybe this is a name worth remembering. Not only is Toshiba's new two-platter 5,400RPM beastie the first ever to rise above 640GB without expanding to the chunkier 12.5mm height profile, it's also claimed to be 14 percent more energy efficient than the Japanese company's previous biggest model. If you don't mind moving up to the 12.5mm class, Toshiba's also bringing out a new MKxx59GSM series, which can stretch all the way up to 1TB, thanks to fitting three platters into the 2.5-inch diagonal space. Samples of both will be distributed to system manufacturers by the end of April, with mass production following soon thereafter.
meh... i want an ssd on my laptop.
hdd's i leave for my desktop: i call it "The Beast".
(it has a Cinderella sticker)
@Mr w00t I agree, I have a 128Gb SSD in my laptop, then keep the bulk of my media on a home server and stream.
@Mr w00t
This would be perfect for my PS3...
@PlatinumSkeet Damn, you must have a lot of stuff on your PS3. I haven't even come close to filling my 120 that came on my slim, but then again I don't use it for media.
Can you say slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww as molasses
Take it from me folks these hard drives are good for one thing and one thing only external USB Hard Drives end of.
Had a WD 640 GIG 5400 RPM running windows 7 on a Quad Core, and it was terrible.
Untill they sort out thr RPM and buffers on these puppies stay well clear.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED !
@Diesel1313
Let's think a little further that your nose:
What about storage arrays that would love stuff like this? I have 12 3.5" 500GB disks spinning away 24/7 using up power.
I cannot wait for the day I can affordably upgrade my array to be 1/4 the physical size, 1/10th the power requirement and double the space by using low-power, small and cheap(er)2.5" disks.
5400rpm? So what. I have 12 of them working together, the throughput beats most SAS / SATA disks and I can run it off a couple of lemons.
No-one in their right mind would buy these thinking they were fast! It's not what the manufacturers have in mind!
Bring on the 1TB disks!!!!
@Crappy Just use fewer 2TB WD Caviar Green drives.
@Crappy
2.5" hard drives will never be cheaper than 3.5" drives in terms of $/GB.
That's great...but where are my 4TB desktop drives?
@Hexydes Sitting next to your cheap SLC SSD
@Oli D And your $500 Macbook. Oh wait my mistake, a cheap SLC SSD might actually exist one day.
@KAL326 Tard points for bringing up Apple in a non-Apple story.
1TB laptop drive - see note 1 and 2
(1) 1TB backup drive not included.
(2) jamming your os and all your stuff on one giant drive will degrade performance and shorten the drives life.
/end truth
@Cy Starkman
Fair point, though could you partion this to improve its speed/life?
@Cy Starkman
(1) Why would they need to include a back up you can buy one yourself
(2) You are talking balls so long as the user keeps it fragmentation free the life of the drive will not suffer.
@Cy Starkman
I'm pretty sure a 750GB drive that is half full will run faster then my 320GB drive that has 1GB free.
@fourthletter
Sure but nah. Let me explain...
OS components and API's r/w, Swap file r/w, cache and temps r/w, Your 6 apps and 10 sys tray items r/w, the song playing r, the other ripping w, the download and auto sys update in the background w. The auto backup of the doc u are working on w, the font list from a menu r.
So that's any given, shall we say millisecond. Oh oh and all of the bits might be causing their own swap/temp/auto save/file check/flag write/check
oh oh and then a background virus scanner and yer email r/w
Defrag? Sure cause magically all of those randomly occuring events are stored sequentially.
A 1TB drive used for everything and your primary system drive gets destroyed. Those heads are bezerk.
And then being mechanical guess what? They wear out going slower n slower eventually crashing into the platter in a last ditch effort to fulfill your over taxing requests.
On disk pcb caches help a tiny bit, defrag helps with seek thrashing a bit, but the outcome is the same.
I could lay out a strategy using multiple drives based on data types and usage but hey why wreck your journey of discovery into the world of dogs balls.
Heh, as for the backup drive, that was a bit of pokey fun but fact, cause what you going to do, backup on DVD or even bluray? Drives are so massive now you need two for one just to backup. Unless of course you want to swap out 200 dvd's or 20 bluray (seen those prices) and send your disc spinner to an early death.
Stick that (750GB) in your PS3 and smoke it XBox!!
This would be great for dual drive laptops, like asus 15 incher (too bad I have a Dell), 1 SSD and one monster HDD.
@10nisman94 drool.
@10nisman94 FYI, the new Dell 1745 laptop has dual HDDs, I have 500GB 7200 rpm primary and a 320GB 5400 rpm secondary.
@10nisman94
I've got two HDDs in my Thinkpad T400, and am waiting to upgrade to an SSD. You can't configure the computer that way when ordering it, but I think it should be an option, and just have no optical drive. In my opinion, this is the best setup for a laptop.
@Mikeserena I have a 1557 :-(, 17" was too big for me, I may look into putting an express card ssd into the wwan slot.
Awesome, I've been wanting something like this for my laptop/PS3 :)
"2.5" diagonal" Remind me how you measure the diagonal of a circle?
@Oli D
Somebody's been confused hard drives with TVs - TVs are measured diagonally, Hard drives are measured on their short side - 2,5" across in this case.
@jars99 Yep, in this case its the author "three platters into the 2.5-inch diagonal space."
nice, I've been waiting for this on my PS3. Only has 5gigs out of 500.
Gah. Still no 9.5mm high 1tb laptop drives. Fuck.
i don't know much about HDDs, so i'd appreciate it if someone could clear this up: will the 750GB hard drive fit into a single drive slot on a laptop with a SATA HDD connection? I'm currently running a 5400RPM 250GB drive that I bought in 2008, and was thinking about upgrading it.
Also, how do I tell whether my HDD slot can fit 9.5mm drives or 12.5mm drives?
@aniym yes, the 750Gb drive is the uber common laptop drive size and configuration. it will work in any laptop built in the last 6 years (how long sata has been the standard interface for storage devices) the new 1Tb drive is thicker than the standard and will only work in laptops/racks that are able to hold the extra thickness. the quickest way to find out if your laptop has the thicker option would be to google your laptop's model number and "12mm drive bay" or check the manual for your model.
Wait for WD to come out with one. I will NEVER buy another Toshiba drive after I had an iBook come with one, and the drive failed because it was part of a massive bad batch. Toshiba makes a garbage product, and I would never trust 1 day worth of not-yet-backed-up data to their trash. My WD 640GB Scorpio Blue works quite well.
What I am really waiting for is a 500GB SSD for under $300 to really speed things up, but I think I'll be waiting a few years for that.
@(Unverified)
I have the same 640gb and I love it. I agree about those Toshibas though. Had bad experiences with at least 2 that I can remember. 1 powerbook and 1 ibook.
Who knows how fast SSDs will drop, especially with the rate I've been seeing them drop so far. I got one for the speed but 60gb is pushing it
Why the fuss about the awkward model no.? Does anyone really care to remember model nos/names on "internal" hard drives or am I just too cut off from the real world....
damn so the 1TB drives are too thick for the PS3.....my guess is I will pass on the 750GB HDD even tho it fits and just wait for the 1TB one to be the correct thickness, which I'm sure SOMEONE will release one that will fit by the end of the year....
I'm was and probably still am going to buy dual 256GB SSDs for my laptop, but the price / ease of getting a 1TB HD for the thing is very tempting....
@(Unverified) Storage vs speed, your choice. Many people think that the more GB's the better, but that's not the only thing there is about a hard-drive.
If it's for your OS -> take a speedy, less power consuming, no moving parts, fast access times SSD.
If it's for (long time) storage (music, movies, pictures on a second/external disk) take a conventional HDD wich are less dollars/GB.
MK-ULTRA!
i recently replaced my MacBook Pro's DVD drive with a 60gb SSD as my boot volume and have a 640gb for storage and backups in the regular hard drive bay. I'm very happy that I now have the option to upgrade the HDD storage at least a little bit if I need to. The 1tb would be awesome but I really cant complain with what I have.
@pcorlatan How did you do that? I never use my DVD drive, and would love some extra storage/battery
@Oli D
That newer unibody macbooks are really simple to open up. Once inside it's fairly simple to remove the DVD drive and I bought a hard drive bay from NewModeUS. Here's the link to what I got:
http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_reviews_info&products_id=259&reviews_id=58
Then I bought an enclosure for my DVD drive to use it as an external!