Company leads the industry in small form factor HDD business

TOKYO--Toshiba Corporation, the industry leader in small form factor and high capacity hard disk drives (HDD), today announced that it would achieve cumulative production of 40 million 1.8-inch HDD^*1 on October ^7th, 2006.

Toshiba entered 1.8-inch HDD market in 2000, at that time concentrating on PC peripheral applications, and in 2002 pioneered penetration of the consumer electronics sector and new applications in personal mobile products. Since then Toshiba has consistently won the largest share in the market for this increasingly popular drive^*2. The achievement of cumulative production of 40 million drives is the result of Toshiba's proactive promotion of new markets.

Toshiba has long recognized that leadership and success in the HDD market rests on robust, reliable products that support two must-have characteristics: small size and high capacity. This has inspired the company to promote innovations in such data-density-boosting advances as giant magnetoresistive read heads and, most recently, high recording density perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), and to promote miniaturization that has seen the company take the lead in pioneering 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch and 0.85-inch drives.

With its PMR technology, Toshiba has set new industry benchmarks in disk capacity in both 1.8- and 2.5-inch drives. The company first^*3 applied the technology to 1.8-inch drives in 2005, and then introduced it to 2.5-inch drives, a market-leading initiative that allowed the company to further consolidate its technological advantages. Cumulative production of high capacity PMR drives passed 1 million units in the middle of September.

Toshiba will continue to meet needs for higher recording densities and data capacity by applying PMR technology to its product line up. Toshiba will also continue to offer highly reliable, cutting-edge products. The company's latest HDD products, including 1.8-inch HDD, will be on display at CEATEC Japan, from October 3 to October 7 at Makuhari Messe near Tokyo.

About Toshiba's HDD business
Toshiba has been the industry leader in small form factor HDD through continued introduction of 2.5-inch HDD in 1990, 1.8-inch in 2000, and 0.85-inch in 2004. Toshiba has also led the way in bringing HDD to new fields and providing products for special applications requiring higher levels of performance. For example, Toshiba was aggressive to develop HDD offering the vibration and temperature resistance required in automotive applications, and has won approximately 80% share of the automotive HDD market^*2, and achieved cumulative 4-million shipment of HDDs for automotive application.

The company also supports high-end notebook PC's that needs large capacity HDD. In 2.5-inch HDD, Toshiba continues to lead the industry through such breakthrough products as the 200GB MK2035GSS, which offers the highest areal density yet achieved^*4 using PMR technology and the industry largest capacity^*5 in 9.5mm-thick drives, and the 160GB MK1637GSX, which features a rotation speed of 5400 rpm.
Cumulative production achieved total of 150 million units for all the HDD product line-up.

Note: HDD capacity is calculated on the basis of 1-gigabyte =1-billion bytes