TOKYO -- Toshiba Corporation today announced two new CD-ROM drives that bring new levels of high-speed operation to both the portable and desktop computing environments. The XM-1602B super-slim drive stands only 12.7mm high, ideal for portable computers, and offers a maximum 20-time rotational speed. The XM-6102B desktop drive stands 41.5mm high and achieves a maximum 24-time rotational speed.

The CD-ROM drive market is surging, with 30% growth to a worldwide market of over 62 million units projected for this calendar year. The two-fold trend in drives is to better performance through higher transfer rates and to models with the slim lines that are a must for ever-smaller portable PCs -- without any loss of performance. Toshiba's latest drives meet both demands with state-of-the-art high-speed performance.

The XM-1602B is only 12.7(h) x 128(w) x 129(d) mm. Despite its small dimensions, the fruits of high density mounting, it achieves a maximum 20-time rotational speed, thanks to a high-speed motor, pick-up and system LSI especially designed for super-slim CD-ROM. This combination of advanced hardware supports constant angular velocity (CAV) disk rotation, which assures a constant rotation speed and allows drive to read data at a rate of 3000 kilobytes per second. Greater responsiveness and faster data downloads are achieved by a seek time of only 125 milliseconds and an access time of 135 milliseconds. New materials in the casing reduce the drive's overall weights to only 250 grams.

The XM-6102B's enhanced performance results from the combination of a newly developed LSI, which speeds up the data read and transfer, with an enhanced drive motor. It can read 3600 kilobytes of data a second, and offers lightning-fast data access: a seek time of 85 milliseconds and access time of 90 milliseconds. The new drive applies a combination of constant angular velocity (CAV) and Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) to data reads, and also incorporates Toshiba's original low vibration system to overcome vibration problem common in CD-ROM drives with a high rotational speed CD-ROM.

Both XM-1602B and XM-6102B can read conventional CD-ROM and CD-R discs, and the newly introduced CD-RW (rewritable) discs. Samples of two discs are available from today for OEM and third party customers, with a price in Japan of 30,000 yen.

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