Hitachi to Introduce Tiny Drive

Hitachi Ltd. announces today that it has matched Seagate Technologies with what it says is the smallest drive on the market, a one-inch-diameter hard drive that holds eight gigabytes of data.

Its product is distinguised from the Seagte products' with the technology that detects when the hard disk is being dropped.

Prices of the new devices were not disclosed. But the price for storage has been dropping so steadily that it is now measured in pennies a megabyte - the equivalent of about one million characters. (A gigabyte is 1,000 times that.)

- New York Times