Windows Phone Thoughts: Toshiba Readies Truly Tiny Hard Drive: Sub-1-Inch Drive Likely to Appear in Portable Devices Later This Year

"Toshiba has unveiled a prototype hard drive that's smaller than any currently on the market. The drive could start appearing in devices such as cellular telephones and digital music players before the end of this year. The drive is the same length and width as an SD memory card and is 1 millimeter thicker, says Maciek Brzeski, vice president of marketing at Toshiba's U.S. storage media division. A prototype on display at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week has a data storage capacity of 2GB. Toshiba is also planning to produce a sample drive with 4GB capacity around the middle of this year, Brzeski says.

...It is expected to be used in small handheld portable devices such as cellular telephones, digital audio players, PDAs, digital still cameras, and camcorders, Brzeski says. Serious talks with manufacturers of some of these devices have already begun, he says. Toshiba expects to begin sample production in the middle of this year and begin commercial production in late 2004."

Although I greatly prefer Flash-based memory concepts to spinning platters of metal, thinking about a Pocket PC with 4 GB of on-board storage makes me weak in the knees. 8O