120GB hard drive is roughly the size of a matchbox

toshibadrive Toshiba’s announced a tiny, tiny 120GB hard drive aimed at subnotebook computers, portable media players, and the like. At 0.31" tall by 2.12" wide by 2.79" long, it’s just barely bigger than a box of matches (although not as thick).

The drive has a 4,200rpm spindle speed, 8MB buffer, 15ms seek time, and consumes very little power. Aside from being useful in small computing devices, I can see a great use for a drive of this size in a digital camcorder.

No word on when we’ll start seeing these drives make their way into the marketplace but they should be available to system builders and device manufacturers relatively soon. We may get a little more information at CES.

MK1214GAH [Toshiba] via Electronista