Announced at the Consumer Electronics Show, Toshiba is going big with little drives. Little form factor that is. New external 1.8″ drives in 60GB, 80GB, and 120GB varieties will be offered. The packages are truly shirt pocket small. Moving this amount of data so easily will bring security to new levels of ease.

In the next form factor up, 2.5″ drives, Toshiba will be offering 320 GB in a portable external. Since these drives all tend to be USB powered, the traveling technician will be traveling much lighter soon.  That much capacity will make it possible to move approximately 80,000 mp3 files, or about 35 hours of high definition video. (Air travel, with a laptop and a drive full of movies, would no longer seem like a life sentence.)

no more of the small stuff for Hitachi, it’s 2.5″ and 3.5″ from now on.

At the other side of the spectrum, Hitachi, until now a purveyor of many 1.8″ drives, has decided to stop all small drive production, instead concentrating on drives in the 2.5″ and 3.5″ form factor, with improved efficiency.

Toshiba will have the small end of the drive spectrum almost all to itself, as no other major drive producer is working on 1.8″ and smaller - the move instead is to solid state storage.

-

[tags] Toshiba, small form factor, hard drives, Hitachi [/tags]