How low can they go!

I love this picture. Toshiba announced today that they are producing a new 1.8" disk drive using perpendicular recording techniques. This drive has a capacity of 100GB!

It will be used on portable devices such as music players; its only 54 x 71 x 8 mm in size, weighs 59g and can transfer data at 100MB/s using an ATA interface.

I thought I'd compare this to some technology I used to use many years ago - the 3380 disk drive.

The model shown on the right is the 3380 CJ2 with a massive 1.26GB per unit and an access time similar to the Toshiba device. However the transfer rate was only about 3MB/s.

I couldn't find any dimensions for the 3380, but from the picture of the lovely lady, I'd estimate it is 1700 x 850 x 500mm which means 23,500 of the Tosh drives could fit in the same space!

Where will we be in the next 20 years? I suspect we'll see more hybrid drives, with NAND memory used to increase HDD cache then more pure NAND drives (there are already some 32GB drives announced). Exciting times...