World's First 7mm 500GB HDD Shipping from Hitachi

Traditionally, HDDs are considered the bulkier storage solution, at least when compared to SSDs, but that's not really the case with Hitachi's new Travelstar Z5K500 drive, that, at 7mm thickness, is just about the slimmest 500GB HDD out there.

With its slim profile and high capacities, the Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family delivers a very good cost per gigabyte and gigabyte per cubic millimeter (GB/mm3) when compared to solid state drives (SSD), and 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch 9.5mm HDDs, offering a compelling value proposition for OEMs and system integrators.

Delivering a very good balance of power and acoustics, 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, which is quieter than most ambient noise in a household.

Moreover, all Travelstar Z5K500 drives feature an 8MB cache and a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface and they're also Hitachi’s second generation Advanced Format drive, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.

It's also important to mention that all Hitachi Z-series 7mm drives feature common connectors and mounting points for standard integration into existing systems, and enable greater design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new thinner, lighter and more robust devices.

Travelstar Z-series family features optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security, while the Travelstar Z5K500 drive family will also be offered in Enhanced Availability (EA) models in capacities of 320GB and 500GB, which are designed and fine-tuned for applications needing “always-on” protection in 24x7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems.

The Travelstar Z5K500 family will be shipping to select distributors in December, but pricing details have not been provided, unfortunately.