Hitachi Announces 500GB 2.5-inch HDD

The ever-expanding 2.5-inch HDD market is all set to get another boost with the launch of Hitachi’s two new large capacity laptop drives offering 400GB and 500GB of storage space. These new drives boast the storage capacity of a desktop with the portability and convenience of a notebook, and are therefore well-suited for use in 'slim' desktops.

The Travelstar 5K500, available in 400GB or 500GB variants, is the fourth-generation Hitachi mobile drive to use PMR. The half-terabyte drives can store up to 500 hours of digital video, 178 feature length movies, 250 games or 125,000 four-minute songs. The drives are available with a 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) interface. Hitachi will also offer an enhanced-availability (EA) version, called the Travelstar E5K500 – also available in 400GB and 500GB capacities – designed for applications requiring 24x7 operation in lower transaction environments, such as blade servers, network routers, point-of-sale terminals, and video surveillance systems.

"The Travelstar 5K500 was designed to address some important trends taking place in today’s notebook computing market," said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "Consumers tend to think of their notebooks as less of a pure technology tool and more of a mobile entertainment device for taking large libraries of movies, music, games and pictures on the go. As a result, notebooks are now starting to ship with wide, high definition screens and large, high-quality speakers for playing digital audio and video. Hitachi’s new Travelstar 5K500 responds to these dynamics with the features, design innovations and technologies that enhance the overall entertainment experience."

"PC form factors are changing dramatically as PCs shift from productivity tools to lifestyle devices," said Richard Shim, Personal Computing Research Manager at IDC. "The most notable change is the emergence of notebooks as the dominant PC form factor over desktops. At the same time, desktops are slimming down without sacrificing, and in some cases improving, performance. One key component enabling this is the less-is-more concept in PCs is hard drives, which continue to increase in capacity while maintaining their relatively diminutive sizes."

The Travelstar 5K500 will ship worldwide in February, while the E5K500 is expected to be available later this year.