laptops notebooks

Toshiba Corp. will start producing a 320G-byte hard-disk drive for laptop computers before the end of this year, the company said.

It is the first 2.5-inch drive to be announced at that capacity, with production to begin in the fourth quarter, according to Toshiba. Pricing was not announced.

The drive is one of a series of five that make up Toshiba's new MKxx52SX family of hard-disk drives. The 320G-byte model will contain two platters -- the circular disks on which data is recorded. Other drives in the range will offer between 80G bytes and 250G bytes of storage space. They will connect via a 3G bps (bits per second) serial ATA (SATA) interface.