14 DAY TRIAL // In case you were wondering what the exact impact of the PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording)is, it seems that Fujitsu could provide the exact answer because they've just announced that they are entering mass production with another 2 laptop hard drives. The 2 models consist of a 250GB and a 300GB version, making them the largest hard drives in 2.5" form factor. The mass release will take place somewhere at the beginning of 2007.
PMR technology exists for about a year, but until now, no breakthroughs have been registered at least not ones that are size-related. The single exception is Seagate's 750GB monster and perhaps it's 2.5" 10,000rpm drives, but as I've said, there were no ground-shaking releases. Until now.
Fujitsu literally redefines the world of laptop storage with these drives. If you take into account that a typical laptop machine has a hard drive that usually ranges from 60 to 120GB, you'll understand why this release is of great importance. Moreover, Fujitsu surpasses Toshiba's 200GB drive (the actual laptop king) by a whopping 50%. And that's quite a performance.
The "MHX2300BT" is a second generation PMR laptop drive and that translates into very low power consumption (about 1.6W) but it also affects the throughput (the drive runs at 4200rpm). But, in fact, that's not such a bad idea since the drive is purely aimed at applications that need maximum storage capacity and not the maximum speed. Native Command Queuing is supported, but the performance of NCQ is rather poor because the main focus here seems to be performance and not multitasking. The disk drive will be available in SATA 2.5 and ATA-8 versions.