Hitachi Ships Speedy 200GB Notebook Drive
Demanding notebook users rejoice: Hitachi has announced today that it began shipping its new 7200-rpm, 200GB 2.5-inch hard drive to notebook manufacturers. The Travelstar 7K200 (in its default configuration without encryption) won't carry a sizable premium over 4200-rpm or 5400-rpm notebook drive. But the benefits may be worth the trade-off in price.
Personally, I notice the lag in notebook hard drive rotational speeds when I'm transferring digital images from multi-gigabyte CompactFlash cards to a hard drive--be it a portable external drive, or the notebook's own internal drive.
Having a high-capacity 7200-rpm drive makes notebooks even more attractive for performance-hungry applications such as gaming and digital video and image editing. Previously, the highest capacity 7200-rpm drive available was a 160GB model. Hitachi says that it is own tests, the company has seen a 20 to 33 percent improvement in performance over competing 5400-rpm drives Hitachi has tested.
According to Hitachi, another of the benefits of the Travelstar 7K200 is its reduced power consumption. Power consumption is comparable to that of competing 5400-rpm drives. Ditto for acoustics.
"The design goal was to make the 7200 every bit as attractive, without any sacrifices," explains Larry Swezey, Hitachi's mobile hard drive product line manager. "It's not noisier, not hotter, and it's equally as robust on shock and vibration. We've made a lot of mechanical improvements to the head suspension and motor, so the drive can better withstand a shock. Operating shock is rated at 350G, up from 300G; and non-operating is in excess of 1000G."
In addition to achieving 200GB on a 7200-rpm drive, Hitachi has made this model its first drive with Bulk Data Encryption. "We do this in conjunction with systems manufacturers; we turn it on in the factory. The system maker marries that with their controlling bios and their security software. The drive is password protected; the AES-128 engine encryption is accomplished through the drive's hardware, and is impossible to decrypt."
The drive also has Hitachi's Quick Erase function to erase the encryption key, so IT managers can wipe the key and make the data on the drive unreadable in a matter of minutes.
The drive is in production now, and shipping first to notebook manufacturers, including Dell. The drive will also be sold in retail channels in the next few months; Hitachi expects the price will be $249.
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I'm totally going to buy this for my PS3