14 DAY TRIAL // The Japanese storage expert Hitachi is full of surprises at this time of the year. After a series of reports claiming that things are far from normal with its storage business, the company has announced a new 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive.
The TravelStar disk comes in two flavors: the standard 5K500 is designed for laptops, while the 'enhanced-availability' version called E5K500 comes with hardware data encryption features out of the box. This enhanced version is dedicated to the corporate sector and is able to run continuously in blade servers, as well as in close-circuit television surveillance systems.
Although 500GB of space for laptop use might sound delicious, there are two aspects that keep the drives out of the users' reach. First of all, both versions of the 5K500 series ship to OEMs only, and the company does not even intend to sell them on the retail market, so you have to get a new laptop for your extra platter space.
Secondly, the new hard drive may not fit in the existing laptop models. Hitachi was not able to scale the new perpendicular recording technology to allow double data on the same surface, so the company decided to add an extra platter to the already existing two. It's true that the storage capacity increased from 250 GB (the competitors' notebook hard drives) to half a terabyte, but so did the physical size of the new hard-drive. A standard laptop HDD measures 9.5mm while Hitachi's 5K500 model is 12.5mm thick.
Both drives come with a SATA-II interface that allow transfer rates of up to 3.0Gb/s and feature Hitachi's unique 'Rotational Vibration Safeguard' system to safely park the heads when flipped over or dropped. The model also supports non-operating shock protection at up to 400G, which makes it pretty hard to kill. Unit's power consumption was not affected by the third platter, and the disk only takes up 1.9W during read/write operations and just 0.7W in idle mode.
The new 500GB hard-disk will be used in Asus' M50 and M70 notebooks, and the computer manufacturer has announced that its products will feature two units for 1TB of storage.