Hitachi GST Launches Family of 750 GB Mobile Hard Drives

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies today announced its new 375GB/platter, 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM, 2.5-inch hard drives – the Travelstar 5K750 and the Travelstar 7K750 hard drive families. Featuring the industry’s highest capacities in a standard 9.5mm two-disk design, the new drives come in capacities of 750GB, 640GB and 500GB. 

The Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 drive families are the first Hitachi GST hard drives that feature Advanced Format. Advanced Format increases the physical sector size on hard drives from 512 bytes to 4096 (4K) bytes. This helps utilize the storage surface area more efficiently, allowing for increased drive capacities and improved data integrity at higher storage densities.

5,400 RPM Travelstar 5K750 Family

The Travelstar 5K750 family is the next generation of Hitachi’s mainstream mobile hard drive line engineered to achieve the best capacity, reliability and cost per gigabyte. It is a 5,400 RPM hard drive offered with an 8 MB buffer and a Serial ATA 3Gb/s interface for fast data transfer rates. The Travelstar 5K750 family has been designed with superior low power consumption for energy efficiency, offering 0.5 watts low power idle and 1.4 watts power during read/write operations, which contributes to longer battery life in notebooks and other unplugged applications. The new Travelstar 5K750 also offers the best non operating shock at 1000G/1ms to protect against bumps and rough handling in mobile environments.

7,200 RPM Travelstar 7K750 Family

The Travelstar 7K750 is the latest hard drive in Hitachi’s 7,200 RPM family, that meets the growing demand for performance computing. With a 16MB buffer, 3Gb/s SATA interface, and excellent media transfer rates, Hitachi Travelstar 7K750 series allows quicker access to data and faster system performance, especially for multi-tasking, and other high performance office and home applications. With the lowest read/write power specification in its class at 1.8W, users don’t have to sacrifice battery life for fast 7,200 RPM performance.

Both Hitachi Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 families feature operating shock, Thermal Fly-height Control (TFC) for better soft error rate and improved reliability, and Hitachi’s TrueTrack Technology for tracking accuracy in high shock or vibration environments. Fluid dynamic bearing motors also deliver a near silent operation. The drives use halogen-reduced components to support the “green” computing initiatives that are of increasing importance in today’s end users.  

Self-encryption Options

Travelstar 7K750 is a self-encrypting drive (SED) designed to meet the industry-standard Trusted Computer Group (TCG) Opal Storage Security specification.  This drive is the fifth generation to feature Hitachi's Bulk Data Encryption (BDE).  These self-encrypting drives encrypt data using protected keys in real time, providing users with the highest level of data protection available.  It also speeds and simplifies the drive re-deployment process.  By deleting the encryption key, the data on the drive is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming data-overwrite.

Enhanced Availably Options

Designed specifically for use in blade servers, network routers and video surveillance systems, the new Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 EA models bring together a host of features such as high capacity, durability

and low power for applications needing 24x7 access to data.1 Based on a proven platform for quality and reliability, the Travelstar drives help system designers, integrators and IT managers build and maintain their storage systems, achieving greater storage density in the same 2.5-inch footprint, while maximizing performance, and improving data integrity in “always-on” applications in lower-transaction environments.

Availability

The Travelstar 5K750 is currently shipping in volume. It will be available through Hitachi GST distribution channels by November 2010.