Toshiba plans to unveil on Tuesday a slim, rewritable HD DVD drive for notebook PCs.

The SD-L912A is a half-inch thick and can read, write, and rewrite to HD DVD-RW discs, and read and write to HD DVD-R discs and to standard DVDs and CDs. The Japanese company plans to start shipping samples of the drive to PC makers next month, Toshiba said in a statement.

If the storage and editing of high-definition content increases as expected, then consumers will likely need additional storage capacity. Spurring demand for storage outside of a PC's hard drive are such devices as high-definition camcorders, Toshiba said. In addition, the increasing number of HDTVs is driving the overall demand for high-def content.

During the 2006 holiday season, for example, LCD TVs capable of playing HD content led sales in consumer electronics, according to the NPD Group. Spending on LCD TVs soared by 109% over 2005, to $924 million.

The write speed for the new drives ranges from 4x to 16x, depending on the disc being written to. Reading speeds have a maximum of 8x on a DVD, and 24x on a CD. A single-layer disc can store up to 20 Gbytes of information, which is about four times more than a standard DVD.

Toshiba is scheduled to introduce the drive in Taipei at Computex 2007, which runs through June. 9.