Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has launched new 500GB, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z5K500 drive, which is a one-disk, 7mm z-height hard disk drive (HDD) designed as a direct replacement for standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives in everything from external drives to laptops, netbooks and blade servers.
Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family delivers the cost per gigabyte and gigabyte per cubic millimeter (GB/mm3), and 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch 9.5mm HDDs offering for OEMs and system integrators, the company said.
With the line of 7,200 and 5,400 RPM 7mm drives, Hitachi users can differentiate product lines by utilising space savings to produce thinner devices, add battery capacity, increase shock robustness, or improve internal airflow and all uses of the volume in a system than shipping a partially "empty" 9.5mm 2.5-inch hard drive with only one disk.
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.
All Travelstar Z5K500 drives feature an 8MB cache and a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface and increase the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities, the company said.
All Hitachi Z-series 7mm drives feature common connectors and mounting points for standard integration into existing systems, and enable design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new thinner, lighter devices.
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 for applications needing protection in 24×7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems.
The G-Technology G-DRIVE slim leverages the 7mm Travelstar Z5K500 drive, making it the thinnest 500GB, 2.5-inch external hard drive enabling users move, work and play with their digital content.
The 500GB drive can store up to 125 hours of high-definition video, 500 hours of standard video, 178 movies, 125,000 4-minute songs or 250 games.