Miniature hard drives are appearing in many devices from MP3 players to cell phones. The little giants currently hold as much as 20 gigabytes of data, with a 30 GB drive due to appear from Toshiba later this year.

A consortium of companies (Intel, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Marvell Semiconductor, Seagate Technology and Toshiba America Information Systems) has proposed a new interface for optimizing communications with these little disk drives.

The proposed specification will be conceptually similar to the Serial ATA interface for PC and server hard drives, which has become more widely used over the last year. That means CE-ATA will replace parallel interfaces and the familiar ribbonlike cables with a serial connection that uses much smaller, thin cables and connectors with fewer pins, which the companies say will help cut power consumption and cost. But CE-ATA will be developed separately with handhelds and CE devices in mind, meaning it won’t necessarily match the bandwidth provided by Serial ATA, said Knut Grimsrud, Intel’s principal engineer for CE-ATA.

Serial ATA-like performance in a music player would just be “overkill,” Grimsrud said. Instead, the consortium’s “purpose is to design a new drive interface tailored to the consumer electronics and handheld gadget segment.”