Hitting the industry sweet sport in the 2.5-inch hard drive market, the new thin New Travelstar Z5K500 drive enables new designs for ultr-portable CE devices, laptops and notebooks.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its new 500GB, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z5K500 drive - the industry's highest capacity, one-disk, 7 millimeter (mm) z-height hard disk drive (HDD).

According to IDC, 500GB, mobile 2.5-inch drives represent 22 percent of the market today, with this capacity growing 42 percent annually from 2010 to 2013. Offered in a family of 500GB, 320GB and 250GB, these drives are the industry's only second-generation family of 5,400 RPM, 7mm z-height drives, which are designed as a direct replacement for standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives in everything from external drives to laptops, netbooks and blade servers.

With its slim profile and high capacities, the Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family delivers the best cost per gigabyte and gigabyte per cubic millimeter (GB/mm3) when compared to solid state drives (SSD), and 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch 9.5mm HDDs.

Delivering the right balance of power and acoustics, the drives feature 1.8 watts (W) read/write power and 0.55W low power idle, and deliver a nearly silent operation at 1.9 idle / 2.1 seek bels, which is quieter than most ambient noise in a household. All Travelstar Z5K500 drives feature an 8MB cache and a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface. They are also Hitachi's second generation Advanced Format drive, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.

All Hitachi Z-series 7mm drives feature common connectors and mounting points for standard integration into existing systems.

Travelstar Z-series family features optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security. When employing BDE, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. The Travelstar Z5K500 drive family will also be offered in Enhanced Availability (EA) models in capacities of 320GB and 500GB, which are designed and fine-tuned for applications needing "always-on" protection in 24x7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems.

The Travelstar Z5K500 family will be shipping in December.

Hitachi GST also released an external USB-powered version of the new hard disk drive. The G-Technology G-DRIVE slim leverages the 7mm Travelstar Z5K500 drive, making it the thinnest 500GB, 2.5-inch external hard drive in the world. Formatted for Macs with simple plug n' play connectivity, the G-DRIVE slim is Time Machine ready for added backup protection.

The 500GB G-Technology G-DRIVE slim will be shipping to retailers in early Q1 2011. Pricing has not been set.