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Tokyo, Japan — Hitachi, Japan’s biggest electronics conglomerate, plans to exit the business of making small hard disk drives as demand shifts to flash memory chips, Reuters reports citing the Nikkei business daily reports on Sunday.

“Hitachi’s hard drive unit, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has already stopped production of 1-inch hard drives and plans to stop shipping 1.8-inch drives around next summer, the newspaper said.

The Nikkei also said Hitachi rival Fujitsu has given up on plans to enter the market for small drives. Fujitsu had been developing 1.8-inch drives with U.S.-based Cornice with plans to bring a product to market in 2007.

Hitachi will focus on 2.5-inch and 3.5-drives, anticipating strong demand for the bigger drives that are used in personal computers and digital electronics such as DVD recorders, the Nikkei said.” More at Reuters.

On  Dec 14 Intel announced the Intel Z-P140 PATA Solid State Drive (SSD), an ultra-small - smaller than a penny, weighing less than a drop of water - complete storage solution for mobile digital entertainment, and embedded applications, offering low-power, high performance, and durability, which is also 400x smaller than a 1.8″ hard-drive.

Using the industry standard PATA interface, the Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD offers the capacity and features to accelerate computing trends towards greater mobility.

Right Fit
Using the standard PATA interface, chipscale package-on-package technology, and a form factor significantly smaller than hard disk drives, the Z-P140 PATA SSD enables smaller and easier storage design.

Right Capacity
2, 4, 8, and 16GB capacities are enough to support operating system storage, applications, data, and media storage, meeting mainstream density requirements for most computing markets.

Right Performance
Fast to boot, load, and run applications, with low power and extended durability, solid state technology has no moving parts, allowing for faster system response and longer battery life.

More at Intel here and here (in pdf).

TOKYO, Japan — On Monday, Dec 10, Toshiba announced its entry into the emerging market for NAND-flash-based solid state drive (SSD) with a series of products featuring multilevel-cell NAND flash memories.

Offered in a range of form factors and densities, Toshiba’s solid state drives are designed primarily for notebook PCs. They will be showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, from January 7th to 10th. Samples and mass production will follow from the first quarter (January to March) of next year.

Moving NAND-based storage architecture forward, Toshiba’s first solid state drives offer three densities: 32 gigabytes (GB), 64GB and 128GB. SSD realize low power consumption, a fast boot time, and lightweight, but market penetration has been held back by low densities and high prices.

Toshiba’s new SSD integrate an original MLC controller supporting fast read-write speeds, parallel data transfers and wear leveling, and achieve performance levels comparable to those of single-level NAND flash SSD. By applying MLC technology, Toshiba has realized a 128GB density in a 1.8 inch form factor. Toshiba expects the launch of its SSD line-up to speed up acceptance of solid state memory in laptops and digital consumer products, and to widen the horizons of the NAND flash market.

The new products utilize NAND flash memory fabricated with 56nm process technology, along with controller chips and DRAM, on a 70.6mm (L) x 53.6mm (W) x 3.0mm (H) platform. The maximum read speed is 100MB a second, and the maximum write speed of 40MB a second with the SATA2 interface (transfer rate of 3Gbps), which is compliant with high speed serial interface. The operating life is 1,000,000 hours. More at Toshiba.

Finally Dell has released details of its first Tablet PC, Dell Latitude XT, which will have multi touch capabilities at a later date.

Dell Latitude XT Specs:

- Intel Core 2 Duo 1.2GHz ULV processor U7600 or Core 2 Solo 1.06GHz ULV processor U2100
- Vista Business (32-bit or 64-bit); Vista Ultimate (32-bit) or Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005
- 12.1″ 1280 x 800 WXGA  Display; Optional LED-backlit Display
- Multi Touch - Capacitive Touch Screen
- Integrated ATI Radeon X1250 UMA Adapter
- Memory up to 3GB
- 40 or 80GB 1.8″ 4200 RPM / 120GB 1.8″ 5400 RPM Hard Drive OR 32 or 64GB Solid State Disk (SSD) Drive options
- 802.11a/b/g/n; HSDPA or EV-DO rev A; Bluetooth 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet
- ExpressCard54 and SD slots, 1394, VGA and USB 2.0
- Scroll Wheel, Biometric Reader, TPM 1.2, Super Low Profile Power Adapter
- Up to 5 Hrs Battery life with standard 43WH pack or up to 9 Hrs with extended 45WH pack
- Weighs 3.57 lbs, 1-inch thick
- Starts at $2500

More at Direct2Dell here and details and video about Multi-Touch Capacitive Touch Screen here.

A lightning-fast, full-functioning PC that fits in your pocket, this astoundingly compact device puts world-class computing in the palm of your hand. Says Sony about its VAIO VGN-UX490N/C Micro PC.

Featuring a cutting-edge, 48GB Solid State Drive and three to seven hours of battery life with a large capacity battery, the VAIO UX Premium Micro PC is small enough to fit in your pocket and powerful enough to tackle the most complicated tasks. An Intel Core 2 Solo ULV processor and a Windows Vista Business operating system make the VAIO UX a perfect fit in today’s mobile computing landscape where power and portability are essential.

Specs:

- Intel 1.2 GHz Core 2 Solo U2200 Ultra Low Voltage, 533MHz FSB
- Microsoft Windows Vista Business
- 4.5″ 1024×600 Wide SVGA LCD Touch-Screen
- 1GB 400MHZ DDR2 RAM
- 2 Built-in Cameras (front: 0.3M pixels and back: 1.3M pixels) Built-in microphone
- 48GB Ultra ATA NAND SSD
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
- 251MB Video RAM
- Memory Stick Media Slot
- Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, 802.11 a/b/g, Integrated Bluetooth
- 1.5 to 3.5 Hrs Battery Life with Standard Battery and 3 to 7 Hrs with Large Capacity Battery
- 5.91×3.74×1.27-1.50, Weighs 1.2 lbs with Standard Battery
- Available for $2500

Get yours at SonyStyle.

Seoul, Nov 05 (Korea Newswire)– Samsung has become the first in the industry to sample 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch 64Gigabyte (GB) solid state drives (SSD) with a super-fast SATA (Serial ATA) II/native SATA interface. With a sequential write speed of 100Megabyte per second (MBps) and sequential read speed of 120MBps, the SATA II SSD is poised to expand the market for solid state drives from notebook PCs to corporate servers and other high-performance storage applications.

“The 64GB SATA II SSD is based on Samsung’s cutting-edge NAND technology with dramatically improved performance specs that are taking system performance to a whole new level of efficiency,” said Jim Elliott, director, NAND flash marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

Samsung’s SATA II SSD combines a 50 nm-class, single-level-cell (SLC) 8Gb flash chip with a Samsung proprietary, high-speed SATA controller and supporting software.

The new SATA II SSD has a 3.0 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) interface speed which is twice as fast as its SATA I predecessor. Moreover, the SATA II SSD requires only half as much power as the 1.9 watts consumed by hard drives now used in notebook PCs and only one-tenth the power consumed by enterprise-class 15,000rpm hard drives in servers.