Toshiba Corp. has developed a 0.85 inch hard disk drive that can be used to store about 2 or 3 gigabytes of music and video in mobile phones and other portable gadgets. A 2-gigabyte hard disk drive can store about 30 hours of music but cannot store movie-length video, she said. Toshiba plans to start taking orders by the summer of next year to start mass production as early as 2005, she said. Pricinghas not been decided. Demand is growing for smaller hard disk drives for network gadgets. The world's smallest HDD is believed to be a 1 inch (2.54 centimeters) model from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi's U.S. unit. This 2-gigabyte hard disk drive can store about 30 hours of music but cannot store movie-length video.
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