Toshiba’s New 80GB 2.5-Inch HDD for Automotive Applications Has Industry Largest(a) Storage Capacity

– New Products Boost Vibration Resistance by 50 Percent(b) —

Toshiba Corporation today announced the latest additions to its market-leading lineup of 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDD) for automotive applications: an 80GB drive offering the industry’s largest(a) capacity, and a 40GB drive. The drives will be used in such applications as car navigation systems, and will be released in industrial and retail versions. Sample shipping of the drives has started and mass production will start in March 2008.

Toshiba’s automotive HDD have earned an unrivaled reputation for environmental toughness and performance, and made the company the leader in the world automotive HDD market. With its latest drives, the company has further enhanced durability and increased data capacity, using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to boost areal recording density and to raise storage capacity to 80GB (MK8050GAC and MK8050GACE), double that of Toshiba’s current automotive drives(b) .

Alongside higher storage, the drives offer numerous enhancements. Lighter moving parts, a highly rigid enclosure, and the vibration resistance achieved by a highly accurate head positioning system, takes overall, vibration resistance to 29.4m/s2 (5-50Hz), a full 50% improvement over current automotive models(b). In addition, an advanced aerodynamic design for the head slider, which “floats” the head on a cushion of air, maintains the flying head at a constant distance from the disk, a refinement that brings greater reliability to data read and write in low pressure conditions at high altitude. As a result, the new drives can operate at up to 5,500m above sea level, 1,200m higher than current automotive models(b).

In addition to map data information for car navigation, the new HDD can be used in on-board entertainment systems, to store high capacity movie, digital image and music files.

Toshiba introduced its first HDD for automotive application in 2001. The company’s highly durable and reliable products today command a share of approximately 85% of the global automotive HDD market(c), and cumulative shipments now stand at over 7-million units.