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Notebooks are still lacking the high storage capacity associated with contemporary desktop PCs, but companies such as Seagate and Toshiba have been working hard to reverse this. Thusly, we have seen 120GB and even 160GB drives recently, but nothing for the 2.5-inch drive market has so far reached the 200GB mark. Now that has changed.

Toshiba has pushed mobile hard drive storage space to a new level with their release of a 2.5-inch, double-platter hard disk that has a capacity of 200GB. It is a serial ATA II drive and has 8MB of buffer memory. Utilising perpendicular magnetic recording technology to hold 277.1 megabits per square millimetre, the drive density surpasses the current record (which Toshiba also holds.) Available from August, the drive was shown off at this week’s Computex show in Old Taipei.

"We are delighted to announce the addition of this new 2.5-inch HDD to our line-up of perpendicular magnetic recording HDDs," said Kazuyoshi Yamamori, Vice president of Storage Device Division at Toshiba Corporation's Digital Media Network Company. "Larger data capacity in a small form factor HDD is essential for continued advances in the notebook PC market and in personal audio and video applications. As a global leader in small form factor HDD, we will continue to take technology advances to further generations and provide our customers with breakthroughs in capacity and performance."