Toshiba announces new 7mm hybrid drives for notebooks

As notebook designs get thinner and lighter, it is only natural that mass storage must follow suit. Solid-state drives may be svelte but with prices remaining high for high capacity drives, hard drive manufacturers are coming up with less expensive hybrid drives. To that end, Toshiba has introduced two new solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) with a height of 7 mm and storage capacities of 320GB and 500GB.

The 2.5-inch drives go by the model numbers of MQ01ABF050H (500GB) and MQ01ABF032H (320GB). Toshiba is using 8GB of its very own NAND Flash technology in both of the aforementioned drives. Other specs include an average seek time of 12ms, a relatively low noise level of 21 dB while seeking for data (19 dB idle), 5400 rpm hard drive, Serial ATA 3.0, 32 MB cache, operating shock resistance of 400G, while weighing in at 92g. According to the company, media transfer rates reach up to 1288MBps.

Toshiba is also quite proud of the drives’ ‘self-learning algorithms’ which apparently optimize performance based on the user’s access patterns. Since these algorithms are used throughout the device’s lifetime, performance allegedly improves over time.

While Toshiba states “samples will be available from June 28th” (presumably to OEMs), the company has yet to disclose information on mainstream pricing and availability.

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