Toshiba launches 1.8-inch 160GB hard drive

Following yesterday's iPod classic storage bump to 160GB, Toshiba has announced a new family of 1.8-inch hard drives which top at the same capacity. Designed for use in portable media players and other consumer electronics products, the new MKxx34GAL series will also be available in 60, 80 and 120GB sizes, equipped with a single platter spinning at 4,200 RPM and a PATA interface.

The drives have an average seek time of 15 milliseconds, 8MB of buffer memory and a data transfer rate of 100MB/sec. They come with acoustic-reduction features and are said to be 24 percent more power efficient than previous models. According to Toshiba, the 160GB model is available now and provides enough capacity to store as many as 45,000 digital photos, 42,000 digital music files or 130 digital videos.