When you’re designing a new consumer electronics device, turnkey solution or computer system, meeting the needs of the marketplace often requires making products smaller, faster, and capable of storing even more data than last year’s top-of-the-line model.

Hard drive technology is helping manufacturers meet these demands and enabling new product categories. As products take on new shapes, sizes and functionality, the need increases for hard drives that provide greater storage, withstand harsher conditions, generate less heat and consume less power.

Some other important considerations include storage density, robustness, efficiency, drive size and the manufacturer you choose as a design partner.

Density

Advances in data storage, such as perpendicular recording technology, allow for more data to be stored in the same amount of space. In fact, perpendicular recording allows capacity to grow as much as 40 percent per year, providing more storage capacity options for new devices.

Robustness

When you’re designing mobile devices, you have to consider shock tolerance. Hard drives intended for use in mobile and handheld devices should be able to withstand frequent movement, vibration and the occasional accident from day-to-day use. And if you’re creating a device for extreme environments, such as automobile navigation and entertainment systems or mobile surveillance applications, you also have to take temperature and humidity levels into account.

Efficiency

Manufacturers often must create products that run cool and conserve energy. A portable media player, for example, should run long enough on a single charge to complete a base line task, such as watching an entire movie. Selecting a low-power hard drive, properly mounting it, and taking advantage of the hard drive’s power-saving features can help you meet baseline goals.

Size

Drives have grown in capacity as they’ve shrunk in size, enabling a whole new generation of tiny, power-efficient, large-capacity MP3 players, cell phones, portable media players, and digital cameras.

Design Partnership

The hard-drive manufacturer you select should function as a partner during the design phase. As your design partner, the manufacturer should be able to help you select the right drive for your product, provide instructions on mounting the hard drive for maximum air flow and offer guidance on minimizing power usage. In addition, the manufacturer should be able to assure you that your supply forecast will be met, so supply chain problems don’t hamper the success of your design.