Toshiba develops tiny disk for phones

updated 9:56 a.m. ET Dec. 15, 2003

Toshiba Corp. has developed a hard disk drive about the size of a nickel that can be used to store music and video in mobile phones and other portable gadgets.

The 0.85 inch diameter disk is believed to be the world's smallest hard disk drive that can store about 2 or 3 gigabytes worth of information, company spokeswoman Midori Suzuki said Monday.

A 2-gigabyle hard disk drive can store about 30 hours of music but cannot store movie-length video, she said. Toshiba plans to start taking orders by the summer of next year to start mass production as early as 2005, she said.

Pricing has not been decided. Demand is growing for smaller hard disk drives for network gadgets. The world's smallest HDD is believed to be a 1 inch (2.54 centimeters) model from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi's U.S. unit.

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