Toshiba is cranking up the capacity in their fight against the growing popularity of solid state drives with the introduction of a new 5400 RPM 160GB 1.8” hard drive. In the past the majority of the 1.8” hard drives have been limited to 4200 RPM spindle speeds and much smaller capacities.

The new 160GB offering from Toshiba will be known as the MK1617GSG and will use two platters to reach the 160GB capacity. Toshiba will also offer a 80GB model that will use a single platter. Beyond the drive offering a 5400 RPM spindle speed, the drive will boast an impressive 15ms average seek time using 8MB of cache, according to Toshiba. The drive will feature the Micro-SATA interface that is fully compliant with the SATA version 2.6 specifications.

The growing demand for fast efficient storage for consumer electronics devices, as well as the growing segment of mobile Internet devices that have been favoring the use of flash memory or SSDs because of power or form factor requirements, will get a boost from this new Toshiba offering.

Toshiba sees the 1.8” hard drive market space changing shape with the introduction of lower-cost flash and solid state hard drive devices. Still, the price of these flash and SSD devices is still high when compared to the traditional hard disk technology. Toshiba sees a good chance to dominate in this segment by providing fast, high capacity storage at a very reasonable price. The new 1.8” 160GB and 80GB models will be available to OEMs by August.