Fujitsu Ltd has announced its first 2.5 disk drive, the M2706, with 540Mb capacity, aimed at power notebooks and disk arrays. The company believes small form factor drives are an emerging market, offering a high capacity and high degree of fault tolerance when packaged together. The M2706 has an embedded servo system, 5,400rpm spin speed, 512Kb of cache, average seek time of 12mS and data transfer rates of up to 10Mbps. It uses Fujitsu’s own magneto-resistive heads, Partial Response, Maximum Likelihood read channel and thin film medium to yield areal density of 340M-bits per square inch, giving a total capacity of 532Mb on three platters. It weighs 6 lbs 6 oz and measures 3.9 by 2.7 by 0.67 thick, a size Fujitsu believes will make it attractive to notebook makers. Evaluation samples are available now with volume next month; no prices were given.
