Seagate Shows Small 5GB Hard Drive

Miniature hard drive will feature a Compact Flash card form factor.

Martyn Williams, IDG News Service

LAS VEGAS-- Seagate Technologies will begin offering a Compact Flash card form factor hard drive from February this year, the company has said at the International Consumer Electronics Show here this week.

The product, which will be officially launched at the show on Wednesday, will offer a 5GB storage capacity and be targeted at applications such as digital photography, says Rob Pait, director of global consumer electronics marketing for Seagate. A 2.5GB version will also be available, the company says.

Seagate's new drive will increase competition in an already competitive sector of the hard drive market. For several years Hitachi's Microdrive has dominated the space--but that position is already under pressure from companies like China's GS Magicstor and increasingly cheaper and capacious flash memory cards.

Hitting Higher Capacities

No pricing for the Seagate drive was immediately available but it will hold a capacity advantage over Hitachi's Microdrive and the GS Magicstor, which offer capacities up to about 4GB. That lead might not last for long, however. Also at CES this week, Hitachi showed engineering prototypes of a new 1-inch drive it hopes to launch later this year that will have a capacity of somewhere between 8GB and 10GB, the company says.

Seagate began producing 1-inch hard drives in 2004 and has until now focused solely on providing them to other makers of electronics. One such customer, Olympus, is using CES to launch its m:robe MR-100 digital music player in the North American market. Because those products were designed for use with the drives, they didn't need a standard CF interface and instead used a smaller and thinner ribbon cable as a connector.

The path Seagate is taking is in contrast to Hitachi, which until now has sold its 1-inch drive in a CF Card form factor. Hitachi is using CES to launch a new version of its drive with a simplified zero insertion force connector for embedding in portable multimedia devices.

Also at CES, Seagate will launch a new version of its USB portable hard drive. The new model will offer a 10GB capacity and otherwise will be similar to the company's current 40GB product, says Pait.

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