Cornice Inc. is announcing the expansion of its storage offerings with the addition of an ultra thin, high-capacity personal storage device. The Cornice Dragon series micro hard drives, available in 8- and 10-gigabytes (GB), will allow OEMs to offer thinner and higher-capacity consumer electronics (CE) devices while featuring industry-leading robustness, durability, and low power requirements for everyday consumer use.

According to the company, by narrowing the casing around the disk and by shrinking the "z" height, Cornice was able to produce a small and thin drive, which can be used in next-generation, high-capacity mobile phones, audio/video players and personal storage devices.

The Dragon series drives are 40-percent smaller than its predecessor, Storage Elements.

The new Dragon series drives are protected by Cornice's rugged design, Crash Guard, and can withstand excessive shaking, extreme drops, and other abuse without skipping, stopping, or crashing. The technology consists of an Active Latch that locks the head in place with an active latch mechanism; Skip Control and Drop Safe, which allows the drive to actually sense being dropped. This means that even if the drive is in the middle of reading or writing data to the disk, it can immediately react and place the head safety under the active latch before the unit actually strikes the ground.