Toshiba announced plans for sub-one-inch 2- and 4- Gbyte disk drives at the Consumer Electronics Show. Measuring just 0.85-inches, the high capacity drives are roughly the size of a small flash card and expected to be in mass production late this year.

Based on the new 512-Mbit flash chips, Toshiba expects to keep pushing capacity up on the tiny drives. The drives are a quarter of the size of Toshiba's current 1.8-inch drive used in the Apple iPod and is smaller than the popular one-inch drive made by Hitachi and Cornice. They are aimed at cellular phones, MP3 players, PDAs, digital cameras and camcorders. 

Toshiba yet to annouce the pricing. However, some analysts said unless Toshiba can price it as competitive as the one-inch drives, consumers will likely prefer more capacity with a larger but lower cost drive rather than paying a premium for a smaller drive.

By: DocMemory
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