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.