Well, we all know and well aware of Toshiba's obsession with small form factor Hard drives, but today Toshiba managed to turn heads when it made the announcement of world's largest storage capacity hard drive, MK1011GAH, a 1.8-inch drive that offers a storage capacity of 100 gigabytes, the largest(The industry's largest commercially available capacity in a 1.8-inch hard disk drive, as of Dec. 5, 2006) capacity yet achieved in this class of HDD.

Measuring 54.0 × 71.0 × 8.0 mm, it is just bout the size of a 3A battery and weighs 59g. The new drive employs perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology and an improved error correction code to secure the highest areal density of any 1.8-inch HDD in the market, 240.8 megabits per square millimeter (155.3 gigabits per square inch). Toshiba will start mass production of this new best-in-class drive from January 2007. With 2 platters and 4 heads, MK1011GAH offers an average seek time of 15m sec and data transfer rate of up to 100MB/sec at 4,200rpm. The device uses the ATA-7 (LIF connector) interface.

In addition to the enhancement of the storage capacity, Toshiba has also improved power consumption to 0.003W/GB, as defined in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Energy Conservation Law, assuring a more environmentally friendly design. The new drive also complies with the EU's RoHS directive, which came into force in July 2006. Toshiba will feature the new drive at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2007, in Las Vegas, Nevada from January 8 to 11, at booth 12832. Toshiba says it will start mass production of this new best-in-class drive from January 2007.