Next Shot Fired in Teeny Tiny Storage Wars

I am so enjoying the flash memory/hard drive arms race going on right now. With Sandisk and Sony on one side and Seagate and Toshiba on the other, our handheld gadgets are rapidly gaining the capacity to hold more and more stuff.

The latest salvo comes courtesy of Seagate, who just announced their ST1.3 series, which crams 12 GB of storage into a 1-inch hard drive. (Actually, as the illustration shows it's just under 1.2 inches, but what's a few millimeters between friends?) The drive is also designed to withstand the daily bangups that handheld gadgets can suffer. Using what Seagate calls G-Force Protection, the drive can detect when it's in free-fall and move the drive heads away from the platter and switch off, in less than .3 seconds.

The drive starts shipping in Q3, so expect a bunch of new high-capacity MP3 players, cell phones and PMPs in time for the new school year.