Toshiba has unveiled what it claims is the world's most capacious 1.8in hard drive, a tiny unit that nonetheless packs in 100GB of unformatted storage space. To achieve that capacity, the company used perpendicular recording.

The drive, the MK1011GAH, contains two 50GB platters, and four read and write heads. The drive spins at 4,200rpm and has an average seek time of 15ms. It connects across an ATA-7 bus. The drive consumes 0.3W of power, making it ideal, Toshiba indicated, for handhelds and sub-notebooks.

Volume production of the drive begins in January 2007, Toshiba said. ®