Hitachi Ships Industry's First 7mm 500GB Hard Drive

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced the industry’s highest capacity, one-disk, 7 millimeter hard disk drive. The Travelstar Z5K500 is a 500GB, 5,400 RPM hard drive which is designed as a direct replacement for standard 2.5-inch drives in everything from external drives to laptops, netbooks and blade servers.

Size ain't everything!

The Travelstar Z5K500 delivers 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. 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.

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For those worried about security, they will be happy to know that the entire Travelstar Z-series family features optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security. This means that when employed, BDE scrambles the data 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 such as blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems.

The Travelstar Z5K500 range of Hard Drives will ship to select distributors in December, 2010.