Hitachi unveils first laptop 500GB drive
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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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A single hard drive with four terabytes of storage could be a reality by 2011, says Japanese firm Hitachi.
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Microsoft Corp. is giving computer users up to 500 megabytes of online storage for their documents, music, photos and video.
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Hard-disk drive maker Seagate Technology LLC has started shipping a drive targeted at personal computers that offers 400GB of storage space, it said Tuesday.
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Consumer electronics oriented IFA 06 Hitachi's Global Storage Technologies (HGST) subsidiary today launched its first consumer electronics-oriented hard drive that uses perpendicular recording techniques to boost its storage capacity to 160GB.â¦
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Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are pushing the development of an interface technology that they hope will smooth the adoption of compact hard drives into mobile phones, PDAs, and digital music players, the companies say.
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Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) this week said it will ship a line of Serial ATA hard drives designed for notebook usage in Q4.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Seagate Technology LLC, the world's largest hard drive maker, announced Monday the first manufacturer to sell laptop PCs with its new built-in encryption technology.
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Hitachi Data Systems has unveiled its TagmaStore Universal Storage System, a series of three arrays based on a switched architecture that can scale to 332TB of internal storage and manage up to 32 petabytes of external storage.
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Prototype products include the first such drive for use in a PC.
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SL: Seagate Technology has announced that it will begin shipping the world&#39;s highest capacity PC hard drive to retail stores and resellers.
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(InfoWorld) - Fujitsu will soon bring the benefits of perpendicular recording technology to its family of 2.5-inch hard-disk drives. The company is planning to launch two new drives worldwide in October, an 80GB and 160GB model, aimed at consumer laptop computers that also boast a high resistance to shocks, the Tokyo company said Wednesday. The latter is the highest capacity 5,400 rpm yet announced by a drive manufacturer, according to Fujitsu. Perpendicular recording is a relatively new magnetic recording method that is being increasingly employed on many hard-disk drives. The method, like the previous longitudinal recording, relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. However in the new method the north and south poles of the magnetic particles are arranged perpendicular to the disc rather than running parallel to the disc. The result is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk's surface and so more particles can be crammed onto it. At the same time the company will also begin selling versions of the drives aimed at consumer electronics products such as digital video recorders. Key features of these drives are low noise levels and low power consumption.
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Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. (HGST) announced the availability of 2.5-inch hard drives with capacities up to 100GB for notebook computers by the end of 2004, the company said on Tuesday.
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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) - Hitachi Maxell has developed a thin optical disc that could lead to data cartridges capable of storing terabytes of information. The Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) is less than a tenth of a millimeter thick and it's from this thinness that the technology has an advantage over current CD, DVD, and blue-laser discs, all of which are 1.2 millimeters thick. Many of the discs can be stacked together to realize a large data storage capacity in a small space, said Akira Ijichi, assistant department manager of the company's recording media sales department. Working prototype discs on show at this week's Ceatec Japan 2006 exhibition in Chiba, Japan, are based on DVD technology and each holds 4.7GB. Hitachi Maxell envisages cartridges of 100 discs would be only a few centimeters thick but would be able to offer a total capacity of 470GB, said Ijichi. To keep the discs safe each is housed in a protective sleeve inside the cartridge. The cartridge slots into a dedicated drive and the discs are pulled out of the cartridge automatically by a mechanism inside the unit and mounted into the drive. Making the discs so thin doesn't come without its problems. The discs are flexible but optical disc systems require a rigid disc so that the laser remains in focus on the disc's surface. To get around this problem, Hitachi Maxell has fitted inside each drive a 0.6 millimeter-thick piece of glass through which there are holes. Air is drawn through the holes when the disc spins causing the flexible disc to be drawn against the rigid piece of glass to make it flat. The disc marks a different approach than that of many competitors, which are fixed on increasing the storage capacity by using ever more complicated storage technology to cram data more closely together on a disc. HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc achieve higher because the storage bits are smaller and next-generation systems in development rely on holographic technology. Hitachi Maxell has basically finished development of the system but doesn't yet have commercialization plans, said Ijichi. It is considering working with an optical drive maker to develop a better drive for the system. It's targeted at commercial storage applications. The company says that a system about the same size as a tower PC and will be able to hold 4.7TB of data. A 19-inch rack mount model will be able to hold three times that amount of data.
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At CES Asus plans to show the M70S, a laptop with two 500GB hard drives.
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Hitachi&#39;s 400 GByte Deskstar got company: Seagate announced it is shipping its Barracuda 7200.8 to retail stores and system builders, also offering up to 400 GByte storage space.