Now that Apple has announced—and will shortly be shipping—a 60gb iPod, how long until 60gb 1.8” drives are available?

I’ve looked on eBay and Pricegrabber to no avail for 1.8” 60gb drives since Apple’s announcement…

—Neil

The Creative Nomad Zen i think comes in 60 GB versions, and this has been for the past year or so. You really cant say.

The Zen uses a 2.5” hard disk. We’re talking about 1.8” hard disks. I suspect they should be available later this year or next year in better quantities. ALso, you have to imagine that the initial prices will be expensive since they’re the only ones making it right now at that size.

The 60gb iPod uses the Toshiba MK6006GAH 1.8” drive.

4200 RPM, 2MB Buffer, 8mm height, 15ms avg. seek time.

I’m not sure if the Toshiba corporate site url below will work or not, but here it is in any case:

http://sdd.toshiba.com/cda/main.aspx?Path=/818200000007000000010000659800001516/81820000010d000000010000659c000003b7/8182000000e6000000010000659c000003be/8182000000e9000000010000659c00000370/8182000009e6000000010000659c0000223d

It took a little bit before 40GB drives were available at decent prices in retail channels, and I’d expect a wait on the 60GB ones as well. As I understand it, Toshiba sells these drives almost as fast as they can crank them out, and Apple uses a lot of the supply with the iPod, in addition to Toshiba using it in their Gigabeat player.

MK6006GAH is due out in the 4th quarter 2004

I am guessing late though, becuase it is already early in the fourth quarter now.