Following Fujitsu, Hitachi is now stepping up to the plate with its 320GB hard drive for notebooks that also spins at 7,200rpm.
Hitachi is the third-largest producer of hard disk drives in the world, with 17.3 percent share of the market.
Battery life is often a concern with faster spinning drives, but Hitachi claims it has improved this drive's battery performance by 22 percent over its previous versions. It sucks up 1.8 watts of power when reading/writing data (the same as its 5,400rpm drive) and uses 0.8 watts when idling, versus the 5,400's 0.55 watts.
Advanced Features
The Travelstar 7K320 includes many features that translate into very tangible benefits for users, including:
320GB capacity for storing approximately 80 hours of high definition video, 320 hours of standard video, 100 movies, 80,000 4-minute MP3s or 160 games2
The 7,200 RPM provides any operating system with a noticeable advantage in boot times and application performance. A SATA 3Gb/s interface and fast media transfer rates provide faster file copying and document retrieval, better graphics and improved game performance
Best-in-class operating shock protection of 400Gs to minimize the effects of rough handling and vibration
Power utilization on par with Hitachi?s 5,400 RPM mobile drives, so that users can enjoy more ''unplugged'' notebook computing time
The drive?s quiet acoustics provide a richer audio listening experience for music, movies and games
Protect Your Data
The Travelstar 7K320 features optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE), a capability that Hitachi has offered in its mobile hard drives since the start of 2007. Previously, data on a hard drive could be protected either through software-based encryption or a system-level password. Hard drive level encryption provides improved performance and a higher level of security than any of the previously available methods.
When employing bulk data encryption, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. Thus, data encryption at the hard-drive level represents a more sophisticated approach of securing users? data and is generally considered to be virtually impenetrable. Another benefit is that it speeds and simplifies the drive re-deployment process. By deleting the encryption key, the data on the drive is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming data-overwrite.
BDE models ship exclusively with a SATA 1.5Gb/s interface.
Technical Specifications:
Travelstar 7K320
320/250/160/120/80GB
9.5mm in height
7,200 RPM
252 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
2/2/1/1/1 glass disks
4/4/2/2/1 TMR recording head(s)
1000G/1ms non-operating shock
400G/2ms operating shock
4.2ms average latency
12ms average read time
1.0W active idle
0.8W low-power idle
Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 1.5Gb/s encrypted
115/110 grams in weight
2.5Bels typical idle acoustics
2.8Bels typical operational acoustics