View this article at: http://www.macnn.com/news/20793 Tuesday, Aug 26, 2003 12:25pm Toshiba, Hitachi prep new drives Toshiba introduced two slim-line optical disk drives designed for notebooks. The SD-R9012 super slim supports 8x DVD-ROM, 16x CD-R and 10x CD-RW, while the SD-R6112 slim drive adds 2x DVD-R, 1x DVD-RW, and 1x DVD-RAM read support. The tray-loading drives include buffer underrun technology, feature a 2MB buffer, and feature low energy consumption. They are expected to ship to PC manufacturers later this month. Meanwhile, Hitachi will begin selling 2GB and 4GB versions of its Microdrive miniature hard disk drive later this year. The drives, which fit inside a type II Compact Flash (CF) case, will cost about $500 for the 4GB model (November), while same size CF cards will cost between $1,000 (SanDisk) and $1,500 (Lexar).