All this talk about upping the storage capacity in NAND solid-state flash memory may be filling the tech blogs these days, but the hard drive is far from falling out of the picture yet. They’re getting smaller and smaller these days, and now Toshiba is offering a 4GB hard disk that is only slightly larger than a postage stamp.

Less than an inch in diameter — 0.85 inches to be exact — the electronics maker sees the implementation of the tiny drive in portable devices like mobile phones, PDAs, digital cameras, and the like. It would be a good fit for ever popular slim handsets that are making waves these days, because Toshib’a micro drive is a mere 0.197-inches thick.

Don’t expect to access information quite as fast as on your PC, but that can only be expected: this tiny hard drive spins at 3600rpm. Battery life won’t be too bad either, considering that Toshiba’s tiny storage solution only draws 0.12 watts while in standby mode, and 0.60 watts during write operations.

They haven’t indicated what kind of capacities we can expect, but looking at the provided picture, there is at least a 4 gigabyte model to be had.