Flash and solid-state drives have been catching up to tiny, 1.8-inch traditional hard-drives in ultramobile applications over the past year or so, but Toshiba don’t think spinning platters are quite outmoded yet.  The company have revealed three new 1.8-inch HDDs including the industry’s first 320GB unit, using unique high-density platters that permit data density of 516Gbpsi.

Each of the 3.0Gbps SATA drives spin at 5,400rpm and have 16MB of buffer memory, while there’s apparently less of the high-pitched whine sometimes associated with such HDDs; in fact noise is down between 4 and 5dB over previous models.  As well as the 320GB drive, there are 160GB and 250GB versions.

Right now we don’t know pricing for the new MK1633GSG, MK 2533GSG and MK3233GSG drives, but they’ll go into mass production in December 2009.  Expect more capacious HDD-based PMPs – such as Archos’ Android Internet Tablet – and CULV notebooks.

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