CES 2006 - Day 3: Playstation 3, Quarter-size Hard Drives, SED and lots of TVs

A Hard Drive smaller than a Quarter

Toshiba showed off the world's smallest hard drive with a 0.85" form factor. The 4GB drive featured a spindle speed of 3600RPM and weighed less than 10 grams.

Toshiba expects the drive to be used in cell phones and other portable devices later this year.

Although Toshiba says the drive features a "rugged" design we are still wary of putting a storage device with moving parts in something as frequently abused as a cell phone.

On display next to the 4GB 0.85" hard drive was a 1.8" perpendicular recording drive with a capacity of up to 80GB.

We explained the benefits of perpendicular recording here. To recap from our article: "What perpendicular recording does is it records, or magnetizes, bits vertically through the platter instead of horizontally which efficiently conserves surface area which, in turn, results in the effective doubling of the areal density of the platter." The end result in this case is a very small 80GB drive.