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You may soon be able to hold a lot more data on a PDA, smartphone, micro PC, camera or MP3 player thanks to Toshiba's development of the highest capacity 1.8-inch hard disk drive yet. Named the MK1011GAH, the microdrive packs 100 GB into its tiny frame through what's called perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR).

Toshiba said it chose the relatively new PMR technology because of its superiority in areal density recording and recording stability. With MK1011GAH, the electronics giant achieves a density of 240.8 megabits per square millimeter (155.3 gigabits per square inch).

Improved error correction also contributed to the increased capacity of the new drive by making it possible to retrieve highly accurate data at these high areal densities, the company added.

The 4,200 rpm drive, which is 10 percent smaller than Toshiba's previous generation 1.8-inch models, features four platters and two heads, an average seek time of 15m sec, and a data transfer rate of 100MB/sec.

Toshiba will make the 100 GB drive available to original equipment manufacturers in January, the same month it plans to officially unveil it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

According to IDC, Toshiba IDC controlled 80 percent of the 1.8-inch hard drive market during the third quarter, shipping about 40 million since its introduction in 2000.

One of the company's most well-known customers is Apple, which uses the drives in some of its iPods. Today, the highest-capacity iPod is the 80 GB model, which itself uses a Toshiba hard disk, introduced in September. There's every reason to believe Apple may snatch the MK1011GAH up quickly for a future model.

If so, then users would be able to hold upwards of 25,000 songs (at 4 MB each) compared to the 20,000-track cap for the current top-of-the-line model, for example.