Toshiba: More than one million in-car HDD

Demand for storage in cars seems to grow bigger and bigger. Now Toshiba Storage Device Division (SDD) has surpassed worldwide cumulative production of one million HDDs based on perpendicular magnetic recording. See what is coming next...

Toshiba has been a driving force for the industry's transformation to this next-generation recording technology, which is propelling storage capacity increases to further enable the digital world.

Toshiba was the first company to recognize the emerging market for mass storage in the car and has worked with major automobile manufacturers and aftermarket suppliers for nearly 10 years to develop and design digital systems for enhanced navigation, multimedia entertainment and other infotainment applications. The company is currently shipping a 40GB automotive-class HDD with an expanded temperature specification range of -30o to 85o Celsius to meet the stringent requirements of the automobile.

The company continues to be the world leader in the 1.8-inch HDD category and is surpassing the milestone of 40 million HDDs shipped since Toshiba introduced the form factor in 2000. In addition, Toshiba has now shipped more than four million 2.5-inch automotive-class HDDs, far out-pacing other industry players in this emerging market.

"These significant milestones demonstrate Toshiba's technology leadership in pioneering new markets for HDDs,” said Scott Maccabe, vice president and general manager, Toshiba Storage Device Division. “We are enabling an expanding digital frontier with the integration of mass storage in devices from portable media players to PCs to in-car infotainment systems."

The company was the first HDD manufacturer to announce perpendicular magnetic recording in 2004 and ship PMR drives in volume beginning in June 2005, after more than 20 years of HDD industry development around this technology.

Toshiba first integrated PMR into the 1.8-inch form factor, a category the company solidified with introduction of its first 1.8-inch drives in 2000. Today, Toshiba's 1.8-inch HDDs are used in portable media players, mobile computers, handheld GPS systems, digital camcorders and other portable devices, thanks to the capacity increases afforded by PMR. Toshiba is currently shipping an 80GB2 1.8-inch HDD, as well as a 200GB 2.5-inch HDD based on PMR, with the industry's highest areal density of 178.8 gigabits per square inch.

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Source: Telematics Journal

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