The new Travelstar 5K1500 is a 9.5mm, 1.5TB mobile hard drive and is said to feature the industry’s highest capacity in a standard 9.5mm design. The Travelstar 5K1500 aims to deliver high shock protection, low power and solid performance to meet the growing demands for a variety of market segments, including notebooks, external hard drives, gaming consoles and all-in-one desktop PCs.
HGST said that its three-platter Travelstar 5K1500 offers 50% more capacity than currently shipping 1TB 2.5-inch 9.5mm HDDs and 200% more capacity than single-disk 500GB 7mm or 5mm 2.5-inch HDDs, making them ideal for capacity-hungry devices. With better PCMark Vantage and PCMark 7 performance than currently shipping two-platter HGST 5,400RPM models, all Travelstar 5K1500 drives ship with a 32MB cache buffer and 6Gbps SATA interface.
Smaller than current 15mm or 12.5mm 2.5-inch HDDs, the Travelstar 5K1500 drive features a standard 9.5mm form factor for simple integration into many traditional system designs. This allows OEMs and system integrators to take advantage of its huge capacity, 0.5 watt low power idle and 5,400RPM performance to deliver new high-capacity, power-efficient systems for longer battery life in notebooks and other unplugged applications.
With just 2.5 bels idle, the 1.5TB Travelstar 5K1500 drive is also extremely quiet. A dual stage actuator is included for track miss registration improvements for greater data integrity and reliability. All Travelstar drives use halogen-free components to support the ‘green’ computing initiatives that are of increasing importance to today’s end users.
Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing at HGST, commented: "Contrary to popular belief, the mobile hard drive market is not being replaced by SSDs. We continue to invest in and serve both the traditional 9.5mm and 7mm thin and light HDD mobile markets as they offer the best cost-per-GB, performance and proven product reliability for high-capacity, mainstream, Ultrabook and A/V content creation notebook markets.
"HGST continues to have a strong share in the 2.5-inch market and the new Travelstar 5K1500 hard drive is the latest addition to our broad line of 5,400 and 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch drives, giving OEMs, ODMs and integrators an opportunity to grow and differentiate their product lines."
John Rydning, research VP for hard disk drives at IDC, said: "The PC continues to be an important productivity platform for content creators, who represent an echelon of users that value high-capacity portable storage.
"HGST’s new mobile 1.5TB hard disk drive in a standard form factor for notebook PCs provides the highest capacity solution available today for users seeking more storage capacity inside their notebook PC."
The new 1.5TB Travelstar 5K1500 is also available in an Enhanced Availability (EA) model, which brings together a host of features such as high capacity, durability and low power for blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and other systems needing 24×7 access to data.
