Fujitsu ships higher-capacity notebook drive

The race for faster high-capacity disk drives goes on with Fujitsu's launch on Tuesday of a new series of 2.5-inch drives, aimed at the laptop market.

The MHW2 BJ series drives have 160GB capacity, spin at 7,200 revolutions per minute to improve data access times and are serial ATA with 3.0Gbps data transfer capacity. The drives will be available at the end of May.

Manufacturers are locked in a very close race to produce better, faster, and smaller hard disk drives. The Fujitsu drives almost exactly match the performance specifications of Seagate's latest small form factor drives. The Momentus 5400 series drives also have a capacity of up to 160GB and are serial ATA drives.

But Seagate is prepared to claim that at 300Mbps, it has the fastest rate in the industry and that it has a "best-in-class acoustic noise level of 2.5 bels".

Fujitsu also plans to launch a 300GB drive soon, while Hitachi has a one terabyte drive ready in the wings.

Fujitsu's MHW2 BJ series offers fast access to 160GB of storage