Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced that is it shipping its fifth-generation, 7200 RPM mobile hard disk drive.
The Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 is a 500GB, 2.5-inch, 3Gb/s SATA drive designed for notebooks, gaming systems and professional external storage solutions. The 7,200 rpm HDD is just 9.5mm thick.
Hitachi claims that the new Travelstar 7K500 is the fastest hard drive in its class and delivers up to 56 percent higher capacity and 16 percent better application performance than its predecessor.
Hitachi GST has been providing hardware-based Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) as an option on its Travelstar mobile hard drives for four generations. Travelstar 7K500 is one of the first mobile drives to be compliant with the Trusted Computing Group's (TCG) Opal storage security specification, a new open standard designed to strengthen data protection and safeguard notebooks in the event of system loss or theft.
When the Hitachi BDE option is enabled, the hard drive will encrypt all data that comes from the system as it is written to the media. When read back, the drive decrypts the data so that it can be understood by the system. Since the hard drive is doing the encryption work, there is no impact on system performance. A Hitachi hard drive with BDE is always automatically encrypting data, so the system user never has to worry about whether or not the data is being protected. For commercial or corporate IT managers with a large pool of systems, BDE also speeds up and simplifies the drive re-deployment process. By deleting the encryption key, the data is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming data-overwrite.
Travelstar 7K500 has been designed for energy efficiency with low power consumption at 0.69 watts idle power and 1.8 watts during read/write operations, which contributes to longer battery life in notebooks and other mobile applications.
Travelstar 7K500 is now shipping in limited quantities to top tier OEMs. Volume shipments will begin this month. Capacities include 120GB, 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and 500GB. Hitachi will offer an enhanced-availability (EA) version, available in 160GB to 500GB capacities in November 09. The EA version is specifically designed for applications requiring 24x7 operation in lower transaction environments, such as blade servers, network routers and surveillance systems.