The MHW2040AC Parallel 2.5-inch mobile hard disk drive has a capacity of just 40 GB, a rotational speed of 4,200 rpm and an 8Mb buffer size, so why is Fujitsu making such a fuss about it? Perhaps it has something to do with the temperature tolerance, this thing will comfortable keep working within a temperature range of -22F and 185F and relative humidity ranges of 8 percent to 90 percent. Or how about the operating shock resistance of 300G (2ms) and an average idle power consumption of 0.7W?

While the performance is only average then, the environments it can perform only averagely in are certainly extreme. But why would you want such specifications, where would you use such a hard drive? The clue is in the fact that these will be called the navigation series, and are officially automotive-class drives. If there is one place that you need strong temperature and altitude tolerance, exceptional shock and vibration resilience, but not particularly earth shattering capacity of speed then it is in your car. The primary market will be for automotive GPS devices no doubt, although I can imagine developers of automated money teller machines, point-of-sale systems and automatic ticketing devices will be just as interested when the drives start to ship in a month or so.

A word of warning though, don’t get it wet as that is one extreme this hard drive cannot cope with, and it probably isn’t a great idea to be driving (even with aircon) if the temperature outside is 185…