Hitachi intros 4GB mini drive with powerless IBM

HITACHI TODAY detailed the formation of its new hard disk company, created as a result of its buy-out of IBM's hard disk operations.

The new company, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, is 70 percent owned by Hitachi, with the remainder of the shares held by IBM. Hitachi, will assume full ownership at the end of 2005 but in the meantime, it seems IBM will have no involvement in the management of the entity.

And with a bit of a fanfare, the newly San Jose-based company unveiled a bunch of new hard disk products designed to catch the eye and begin to erase all mention of IBM from the hard disk record books.

First, the company waved a spot of its IBM-developed Pixie Dust over the world's smallest hard drive to make it, er, bigger. It reckons it will be able to squeeze 4GB of data on a one-inch drive before the end of the year, thanks, it says, to it engineers having, "overcome numerous magnetic recording challenges associated with developing hard disk drives of this size."

The new drive will use read-write head that is half the size of its predecessor at around the size of a grain of table salt, says Hitachi, in a statement from which all mention of IBM has been purged.

The company says a 4GB Microdrive is made possible by using a "new five-layer version of Hitachi's patented Pixie Dust technology". Patented technology now owned by Hitachi but developed by IBM we seek to point out, not because we care about IBM but we are startled by the subtle stab at revisionism.

Hitachi has some other products up its sleeve that it will deliver this quarter, including new 1.8-inch hard disk drives available in 40 and 20 gigabyte capacities and a third-generation, high-end enterprise hard disk drive that spins at up to 15,000 RPM.

Hitachi says the 1.8-inch Travelstar Compact Series C4K40 drives, available in 40 and 20 gigabyte capacities will be compliant with the SFF8111 standard, designed to slip into laptop computers, tablet PCs, handheld computers, and any portable consumer electronics.

The drives spin at 4,200 rpm, boast an areal density of 67 billion bits per square inch, and claim low power consumption the company says. The new drives are connector compatible with 2.5-inch models making it easy, says Hitachi, for product developers and manufacturers to transfer from 2.5-inch designs to the new 1.8-inch design inside laptop PCs.

The company's Ultrastar 15K73 is a 3.5-inch drive that comes in both 36 and 73 GB capacities, in an industry standard 1-inch hard disk drive "z" height. Hitachi claims a maximum sustained data transfer rate of 77.2 Mbytes/sec, for the drive.

IBM contrived to lose more than $500 million in its last two tears in the hard drive business before handing the lot over to Hitachi in a staggered deal. It remains to be seen whether the new masters will make money as a result. µ