Toshiba to ship 200,000 a month 0.85-inch hard drives

TOSHIBA IS PLANNING to ship 0.85-inch drives, the world's smallest, at a monthly rate of 200,000 units by September, according to a report.

And Japanese companies Hitachi and Fujitsu are also planning on boosting the production of hard-disk drives, specifically 2.5-inch and smaller units to be used in consumer electronics devices.

Hitachi will increase its production output to two million units per quarter for 1-inch drives - developed for use in equipment such as digital cameras. And Fujitsu will double its 2.5-inch hard drive production to 14 million units for the current fiscal year, and has put in about 10 billion yen to expand and develop products at its main plant in Thailand, says the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

The global hard drive market totalled at 260 million units in fiscal 2003 - 80% of which were used for information equipment like servers and PCs, the rest going toward digital home electronics. Units for digital electronics are expected to grow roughly 50% each year, the newspaper said. µ