Toshiba Builds Largest Laptop Drive

Toshiba on Tuesday announced a lineup of nine new 2.5-inch laptop hard drives, including the world's largest to date with a capacity of 320GB. The drives incorporate Serial ATA interfaces and speeds of either 5,400 RPM or 7,200 RPM. Toshiba expects to begin mass production in November.

The 320GB monster includes 2 disk platters and 4 heads, while offering seek times of 12ms and 8MB of buffer. The faster 7,200 RPM drives reach 200GB in size and offer buffer memory of 16MB. Toshiba says the new 200GB drive increases the maximum transfer rate by approximately 46% and the average random access time by approximately 8%.