Samsung boosting 1.8-inch drive capacity to 160 GB
It’s just pre-product announcement, but Samsung’s Spinpoint N2 drive will cram 160 GB of capacity into a 1.8-inch drive. No boost in speed as the drive is expected to spin at 4200 RPM, but this gives the small form-factor drive more storage space than most UMPC owners will need for an ultra-mobile device. After all, these aren’t full-time laptop replacements, right? 
Although I’d love to pop an SSD drive in my Samsung Q1P which uses the 1.8-inch footprint (shown), they’re still too expensive for the limited amount of storage space. Until we see 128 GB SSD drives available for a reasonable price, I’m intrigued at the prospect of a traditional 160 GB drive for my device. I’m pretty careful not to overload my current 60 GB drive, but I’m loading up gobs of music on the Q1P as it’s such a great media player.
(via Engadget)
If this would only be available in an old school IDE version as opposed to ZIF… Helloo, 160GB MP3 player upgrade. But alas, no doubt that is just a pipe dream.
Kevin,
Is your hard drive the ZIF type or the Toshiba iPod type?
I have an eo v7110 (Amtek T700), one of the few UMPCs released so far that uses the larger 2.5″ drives. I upgraded it to use a 160GB drive about a year ago and have become very used to having all this storage, particularly to being able to carry my entire music collection. The lower maximum capacity of 1.8-inch drives has been a big stumbling block for me when looking at options for upgrades to newer, otherwise more powerful UMPCs. This announcement does give me some hope…