Notebooks get capacity boost from Fujitsu
Fujitsu claimed to have taken "a giant step" toward closing the performance and capacity disparities between PC and notebook hard drives on Monday, with the launch of a 160GB, 2.5-inch serial ATA hard disk drive, the MHV2160BT.
The drive exploits the capacity advantage that serial ATA drives have over SCSI drives. However, SCSI drives typically perform more quickly than serial ATA drives and to get around this, Fujitsu has introduced a hardware accelerator. This will "maximises Native Command Queuing performance" the company says, by enabling the disk drive controller to "intelligently and simultaneously" queue and reorder up to 32 instructions.
"In the past five years the computing industry has seen a steady and dramatic transition from desktop PCs to notebook computers," said Joel Hagberg, vice-president of marketing for Fujitsu Computer Products.
"The hard-disk drive industry has keyed off this trend by developing new and innovative drives that rival the speed, capacity, performance and reliability of their larger counterparts," Hagberg added.
Pricing details weren't immediately available.