There is no such thing as too much storage space, says an old computer saying and the engineers from Toshiba seem to live by that expression as the company announced a new mini hard disk drive with an impressive storage capability: 160GB. While 160Gb of storage capacity is looking like old and dusty news for a desktop intended 3.5 inch hard disk drive or a smaller 2.5 inch laptop designed HDD, Toshiba did not launch such a drive but rather one that is even smaller and designed to work with ultra mobile computing devices: an 1.8 inch HDD.

Apart from the two platter hard disk drive which come with an unformatted capacity of 160GB, the manufacturing company also released a single platter device which carries half of the storage capacity of its bigger brother. Both of these small devices are using a recording surface density of 353 megabits per square millimetre (228 gigabits per square inch), according to the news site dailytech. As those hard disk drives are designed to be used in a portable environment, while battery life is very important, Toshiba also decreased the energy drain of the battery because the drives need 33 percent less power to operate than the previous model.

"Toshiba's new 1.8-inch HDDs build on our long-time leadership in this key product segment and gives CE manufacturers the tools to create smaller, lighter and more compelling handheld devices," said Scott Maccabe, vice president and general manager of Toshiba Storage Device Division. "Storage is an integral part of the digital experience, and these small form factor HDDs deliver the capacity, power efficiency and throughput to support, if not accelerate, consumer demand for sophisticated portable computing, multimedia and entertainment devices." The two hard disk drives are part of the MK series which integrate the CE-ATA interface for data transmissions as well as a traditional miniaturized Parallel ATA interface.

Because the 160GB hard disk drive is made up of two platters for data retention, it is also 8mm thicker than the smaller 5mm 80GB model, which is more energy efficient too. According to Toshiba the new 80 and 160GB drives will be integrated into portable digital players and all other kind of multimedia centered devices as well as ultra portable computer systems where their small size, low energy consumption and big capacity will make a huge difference.