Toshiba, one of the leading manufacturers of storage products, announced yesterday a new line-up of high-performance 2.5-inch hard disk drives, including a low-noise flaghisp model that pushes areal density to 477Mbit/mm2 to achieve a capacity of 400GB. The company also announced five new drives that bring new levels of performance, and provide a 7200 RPM rotational speed.

Toshiba's new 400GB low-noise drive is dubbed MK4058GSX and has been built to provide notebook users with a higher capacity hard drive. The MK4058GSX integrates an improved read-write head and enhanced magnetic layer, to boost the areal density to 477Mbit/mm2 and achieve a capacity of 400GB on only two platters. This is the highest data density on any of Toshiba's 2.5-inch drives. But that is not all, as one of the drive's most significant features concerns its acoustics specifications.

Toshiba succeeded in reducing the noise level during data seek by 2 decibels. This makes the new drive almost inaudible when compared with the company's current top-of-the-line 320GB MK3252GSX. So, it's safe to say that the new drive is suited for notebook users who want to enjoy noise-free playback of movies and music. Furthermore, the new drive is said to be approximately 20% more energy efficient than Toshiba's 320GB model.

The company will showcase the new drives at the DISKCON JAPAN 29, which will be held in Tokyo Japan from July 22 to 23 and at IFA 2008 in Berlin, Germany. It is expected that the 400GB model will enter mass production in September, while the other 7200RPM drives will start as early as August. The lineup includes the 320 GB MK3254GSY model and other hard drives with capacities ranging from 80GB to 250GB. Unfortunately, the price for these hard drives hasn't yet been made public, but more details should emerge before the end of the year.