Toshiba's small hard drive for mobile phones

Toshiba has developed a hard disk drive about the size of a nickel that can be used to store music and video in mobile phones and other mobile devices.

The disk is only 0.85 inch in diameter and can store about 2 to 3 gigabytes worth of information, company spokeswoman Midori Suzuki said Monday.

The company plans to start taking orders by the summer of next year to start mass production as early as 2005, although pricing has not been decided. Currently the smallest HDD is believed to be a 1 inch (2.54 centimeters) model from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi's U.S. unit.