Hitachi's disk drive unit unveiled a 1.8-inch hard disk drive to satisfy consumers' needs for smaller hard drives that have enough juice to power MP3 players and personal digital assistants.

Anh Phan, director of business management at San Jose, Calif.-based Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, said Hitachi has forsaken notebook-based connectors for Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) connectors in its new Travelstar C4K60 series.

While standard notebook connectors typically feature 50 pins with a cable width of 48 millimeters, the ZIF connectors use a 22-mm flex cable and 40-pin configurations.

They are optimized for consumer electronics devices and help Hitachi, which competes with Seagate and Toshiba in the hard drive market, reduce the footprint of its new drive by 10 percent. They also allow easier integration through a common connector.

While a smaller size and fewer cables are necessary to cut down on the clumsiness of peripheral hardware, customers don't want to sacrifice storage space, which is why the C4K60 has an area density of 99.8 gigabits per square inch, making it possible for as many as 30 gigabytes of data to be stored on a single disk.

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