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Toshiba's coin-size HDD recognised by Guinness as world's smallest
TOKYO (AFP) Mar 16, 2004
Japanese electronics giant Toshiba said Tuesday its coin-sized hard-disk drive (HDD) had been recognised by the Guinness book of records as the smallest in the world.

The 0.85 inch (about 2.1 centimeters) drive, unveiled in January, has storage capacity of two to four gigabytes and is small enough to be used in mobile phones, digital camcorders and portable storage devices, Toshiba Corp. said in a statement.

The HDD, to be listed in the 2005 edition of the Guinness World Records book due out in September, will be mass-produced from late this year, it added.

Guinness' science and technology editor David Hawksett said in the statement that the world's first hard drive device, introduced in 1956, needed 50 two-foot (60 centimeters) disks to store 4.4 megabytes.

"I could soon hold more information in my watch than I could on my desktop computer, just a few years ago," he was quoted as saying.

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