Hiatchi debuts 500GB laptop drives, but you can't buy them
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If 320GB isn't enough storage for your mobile computing needs, Hitachi has a new option that offers a whopping 500GB of space, but with one caveat: it's bigger than standard laptop hard drives.
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Hitachi has developed a 500GB hard-disk drive for laptop computers, due to be announced Thursday. The Travelstar 5K500, which is the highest capacity drive yet developed for portable PCs, is due to begin shipping in February and should go some way towards quenching user thirst for storage space.Hitachi has managed to increase the capacity of its 2.5-inch drive by adding a third disc platter and by cramming data together more closely on those platters.The extra platter means the drive is physically larger than previous models: 12.5 millimeters thick versus 9.5mm for most current 2.5-inch drives. That means it won&#39;t fit in the drive space in many laptop computers, but Hitachi is confident that PC makers will redesign their machines to accommodate the drive because storage is a key selling point right now.&quot;The hunger from end-users for more capacity has been phenomenal,&quot; said Larry Swezey, director of marketing and strategy at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi&#39;s hard-disk drive subsidiary. He said the new drive is targeted at the type of consumer laptops that typically comes with a large screen and high-end audio and graphics.One PC maker has already fallen for the drive. Taiwan&#39;s&#160;Asus is due to announce Thursday its new M50 and M70 laptops&#160;that will use the drive. The latter machine will contain two of the drives to offer 1TB of storage space.With an eye on this target market Hitachi has made some modifications to the drive to improve performance, Swezey said. There are new vibration sensors that help the drive&#39;s read/write head keep on track. These are required because high-end entertainment laptops have increasingly sophisticated sound systems and larger speakers than can cause vibrations in the drive when music is being played loud. These vibrations can lead to read/write errors and a drop in performance.The 5,400-rpm drive offers a 5.5-millisecond average latency and 12-millisecond average read time. It comes with a SATA (Serial ATA) interface that supports 3Gbps&#160;data transfer although this drops to 1.5Gbps when the optical disc encryption is turned on. The drive consumers 0.95 watts at idle and 0.7 watts at low-power idle, which is only slightly more than Hitachi&#39;s previous two platter laptop drives, Swezey said.In addition to the 500GB drive, Hitachi will also offer a 400GB drive and &quot;enhanced availability&quot; versions of both drives designed for 24/7 use in products such as digital video recorders. The basic versions will be available in February and the enhanced versions about a month later. The basic 500GB model will cost about $399 and the 400GB drive will have a $349 price tag, Hitachi said.
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roundup Plus: Think local, act Google...SanDisk to supply Samsung with miniSD...Hitachi unleashes 100GB notebook drives.
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Now that digital cameras have overtaken film cameras in sales, users are beginning to encounter a familiar problem: bulging image files and folders filling up computer hard drives.
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InfoWorld - Hitachi has developed a 500GB hard-disk drive for laptop computers, due to be announced Thursday. The Travelstar 5K500, which is the highest capacity drive yet developed for portable PCs, is due to begin shipping in February and should go some way towards quenching user thirst for storage space.
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(InfoWorld) - Fujitsu has developed a hard-disk drive suitable for use in laptop PCs and video recorders with a capacity of 300GB, the largest in its class, the company said Tuesday. The drive is a 2.5-inch type with a serial ATA interface and offers a 50 percent jump in capacity over Fujitsu's current most capacious hard-disk drive of this type, it said in a statement. Higher capacity drives are available but they are typically larger and have slower interfaces. In the case of laptop PCs the slower interface means they aren't as fast at handling the digital video files that are now common these days while for video recorders the larger size drives lead to bulkier products. Fujitsu said the new drive will be available from late February. The company hopes to sell 1.5 million of the drives during fiscal 2007, which is the period from April to March 2008.
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120GB per 1.8in platter Toshiba has taken the wraps off a new hard drive recording technology it claims will dramatically increase the capacity of the 1.8in drives used in portable media players like Apple's newly announced iPod Classic.â¦
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Drives in PCs and media centres from 2005
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(InfoWorld) - If you're in any doubt that flash memory-based solid-state disks are on a course to quickly replace hard-disk drives in laptop computers, just take a look along the aisles of this year's Computex trade show. Solid-state disks and machines containing them are plentiful at the show, which brings together the world's most important PC manufacturers and component makers with buyers from around the world, and is a good gauge of the direction of the industry. That solid-state disks are replacing hard-disk drives shouldn't come as a total surprise: they're lighter, quieter, use less power and are sturdier than hard drives. The transition is being accelerated by fast price drops in the flash market. For example, an 8GB chip that cost $11.36 at the end of 2006 currently costs $8.47 on the spot market. That's a drop of 25 percent in six months. For example,Â SanDisk debuted its first SSD, a 32GB model, at January's CES but a mere six months on at Computex it's showing a 64GB model. The company says much higher-capacity drives are possible today but will be too expensive for most enterprise users, so it's increasing the capacity of its drives while keeping them at what it considers the sweet-spot of price and storage space. Like SSDs from competitors, the SanDisk drives are offered as drop-in replacements for 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch hard-disk drives and so can be offered by system makers without the need for any modifications. As SSDs become more common the company believes smaller form-factor drives will be used in machines specifically produced for solid-state storage. "The old technology of the hard disk is going to go away from the mobile PC market and be replaced by [solid state] media," said Doreet Oren, director of product marketing at SanDisk's computing solutions division in Israel. Some analysts agree. In a report issued in May, iSuppli said it expects 24 million laptops sold in the fourth quarter of 2009 -- about 60 percent of the anticipated market -- will have flash storage, versus less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2006. Also on show at Computex is a wide range of solid-state disks intended for the industrial sector. Such drives are targeted at military and aviation applications and began replacing other storage methods several years before their entry into the PC market, thanks to the willingness of such customers to pay higher prices. Apacer TechnologyÂ is demonstrating a 128GB industrial SSD that can replace a 2.5-inch hard drive and operate at temperatures between -40 degrees Celsius and 85 degrees Celsius. It will be available in the fourth quarter, and a second version with double the data read speed of 200MbpsÂ will be available in early 2008. Alongside it was a flash-based RAID (redundant array of independent, or inexpensive, disks) drive which has two Compact Flash card slots. The capacity depends on the cards used. It's not only in the SSD arena that storage advances are on show at Computex. Toshiba has the latest in its line of 1.8-inch hard-disk drives, a model that can store 100GB, on show. The drive can be fitted into portable media devices, like the iPod, or ultra portable PCs. Toshiba is also using Computex toÂ unveil its first HD DVD rewriter driveÂ for laptop computers. A single-layer HD DVD-RW disc can store up to 20GB of information, which is just overÂ four times the capacity of an equivalent DVD. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has its 1TB drive that was unveiled at CES and new at the show is a 250GB 2.5-inch drive for laptop computers. The 5K250 includes drive-level encryption and has 56 percent more storage space than its predecessor, the 160GB 5K160. Â
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Internal disk eats away at DAS IBM and HP are neck-and-neck for the second place position in the external disk storage market but remain well behind EMC for top billing, according to the latest report by research house IDC.â¦
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Company's drive is not just for OEMs anymore.
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At Fry's this afternoon, where I bought two 500GB Firewire drives. Which it turns out I needed because after I got home all three external drives attached to my desktop were reported as damaged beyond repair by the new Mac OS. Coincidence? Lucky that I had exactly the hardware I needed to dig out of the mess? Who knows!
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Discs would offer 100 times the capacity of today's DVDs--but when will they be available?
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Hitachi Ltd. said on Tuesday it is  seeking to push the limits of data storage with smaller  stamp-sized disks for handheld gadgets and vastly  higher-capacity drives that can store up to 100 films.
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Solid-state drives may replace hard drives as future storage devices on computers, but not until their price plummets. Alienware has SSDs and other cool hardware on its latest PCs, the Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktops, but its prices rise with the SSDs. Innovation is also the appeal of Plantronics&#39; Calisto Pro Series, a sophisticated hands-free telephone system that merges wired, wireless, and online communications into one system. Moving to the kitschy, Saitek allows users to personalize PC scrolling by inserting a printed picture on a mouse top.The future of PC storageAlienware provides a glimpse of future PC storage with its Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktop PCs, which come with 64GB SSDs (solid-state drives).Boot and program load times are quicker with SSDs and they are more reliable, Alienware says. They also consume less power than hard drives, the company says.However, SSDs are expensive. An SSD-free Aurora ALX system with Windows Vista Ultimate, running Advanced Micro Devices&#39;s Athlon 64 X2 6000 64-bit processor, a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card, 2GB of memory, a Logitech gaming keyboard, and a 320GB hard drive costs $4,099. The price jumps to $5,799 when the hard drive is replaced with two 64GB SSDs.Hard drives provide more storage capabilities than SSDs, so it&#39;s smart to hold off until SSDs become competitive on price and storage capacity.Both PCs are available at Alienware&#39;s Web site.AAA to the rescue, againThere may be a Chinese restaurant a few blocks away, but is it good? AAA Mobile&#39;s GPS-based travel guide for mobile phones not only provides directions to the restaurant, but also shows how it rates. The ratings feature gives it a leg up over GPS services that provide only locations and directions.The service also gives hotel ratings and point of interests recommended by the AAA service. That is helpful for tourists and pedestrians wiggling around big cities in search of places to eat and sleep. Users can bookmark the locations.The 100,000 listings provided by the service may be tiny, but it could start a trend of more GPS systems adding recommendations and ratings.It works only on mobile phones in the United States with Verizon Wireless&#39;s service and is available for $9.99 a month.Make the mouse your ownInnovation on mice hasn&#39;t hit a wall -- Saitek&#39;s Photo Mouse lets people customize the top of a mouse with printed pictures, making it fun to use. A hatch on the top of the mouse opens up, where a picture can be inserted. The idea is to personalize a mouse, said Mark Starrett, Saitek&#39;s director of marketing, in a statement. But then pictures of loved ones can be placed on a mousepad or as PC wallpaper too, so pick your choice. The kitschy $19.95 wired optical mouse works with Windows and Mac systems.Converged communicationsPlantronics&#39; Calisto Pro Series is a hands-free telephone system that combines wired, wireless, and online communications into one unit. The system can take landline, mobile phone or VoIP calls either through a wireless handset or Bluetooth headset.A desk-based base station houses and recharges the wireless handset and a Bluetooth headset. The handset operates at a range of up to 300 feet (91 meters), according to Plantronics. Users can also download up to 200 Microsoft Outlook contacts from a PC to the handset.A Bluetooth headset not only takes calls from landlines, it also directly connects to a Bluetooth-compatible mobile phones. A PC connects to the base station through a USB port to accept VoIP calls.Despite a clunky base station, Calisto Pro is a productive device to have for multiple forms of communication. It became available in the United States in September for $279.95.
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Sells Seagate OEM drives to end users Online retailer Ebuyer.com has many disgruntled customers knocking at its door after a cock-up with the manufacturer warranty on some of its Seagate hard-drives.â¦
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Solid-state drives are increasingly an option for laptop purchasers -- but while manufacturers are pushing the option, few consumers are taking the bait.