“Toshiba plans to begin commercial production of its 0.85-inch hard drive before the end of this year, the company says.

The drive, which was first unveiled earlier this year, is about the same size as an SD (Secure Digital) memory card. Target applications include a new generation of smaller digital music players and other portable multimedia devices such as cellular telephones.

Specifications of the first production drives were not available, but Toshiba’s latest prototype drive can store up to 2GB of data and about one-tenth of an inch thick, a Toshiba spokesperson says.

Initially Toshiba will produce drives for sale to other companies for inclusion in their own products, he says. Typically it takes between three and six months for products featuring new components to appear on the market.”

[Original Article]

The rest of the article goes on to project a storage utopia, where regular 3.5″ drives are a common 2 Terabyte size. The bit about getting 15-30 GB on a .85″ drive is amazing. The article projects these wonders by the end of the decade, but I doubt if it will take that long, if it can be done at all. Samsung’s minute drives are being launched this year, so the thought of growing to that extent in 6 years isn’t that much of a stretch.

I thik we’ll see a Terabyte on the desktop by the time Longhorn ships. Am I just dreaming? We’ll see.