RANDOM NEWSBYTES
TONY WALTHAM
Hitachi Global Storage Techno- logies recently introduced the industry's first 500GB, 2.5-in 5,400rpm SATA disk drive for notebook PCs, a robust, high-performance drive that offers the highest capacity available for notebook PCs.
Measuring 70 by 100 by 12.5mm (WDH), the Travelstar 5K500 is not much larger than a deck of cards (but much slimmer), as the illustration shows, and the drive can also serve as portable high-capacity external storage if bundled up in a small case, when it can be hooked up using a USB or Firewire cable.
This is Hitachi's fourth-generation drive to use perpendicular magnetic recording technology, and Hitachi claims an average seek time of 12 milliseconds for the Travelstar 5K500, while Tom's Hardware has benchmarked it with an average access time of 18.5 seconds, beating the only other contender in this capacity and form factor, the Samsung HM500LI Spinpoint. With a three-platter design, Hitachi's literature also notes that the Travelstar 5K500's performance is "the highest among 2.5in. 5,400rpm drives in PCMark testing."
This year, Intel forecasts that notebook PCs will outsell desktops and the trend towards mobile computing continues to see shrinking form-factors, whether it be ultra-slim notebooks or the so-called netbooks or nettops.
Somehow 500GB doesn't sound that much these days, but we shouldn't be complacent since it represents the remarkable advances predicted by Moore's Law - even though Gordon Moore was speaking about silicon-based technologies.
If anything, hard disk capacities have slightly exceeded his pronouncement of a "doubling in capacity or power every 18 months." And we certainly need the ability to store the exploding volumes of data arriving on our desktops daily, reflected by the fact that during the last quarter, the volume of video put on the Internet was greater than the sum of all new web content for the prior five years, as I learned in an interview last week.
The drive also has what is referred to as a "rotational vibration safeguard" that compensates for vibration or shock effects, as might be felt from speaker systems built into a notebook PC. The specs also claim this drive can withstand 1,000G when idle, and 400G in use.
The disk, weighing just 148 grammes, is quiet and draws relatively little power, with an average of 2.3 watts in seek mode, 1.4 watts in read-write mode, and just 0.7 watts when idle.
If there is any drawback, it might be the height of the drive and its SATA interface, rather than the parallel UltraATA found in most current notebooks where 9.5mm drives, be they spinning or Flash SSD, are the norm.
Expect Hitachi to find some OEM notebook makers who will help deploy this disk, while you can always buy a case and use the Travelstar 5K500 as a highly-portable external drive, where it could serve as mobile storage for the data on more than one PC or notebook, while being small enough to slip into a shirt pocket.
The drive also has a hard drive level data security option, whereby the data is scrambled using a key as it is written to the disk, offering a higher level of data protection than traditional password-based security.
There are 400 and 500GB models available and the price of the Travelstar 5K500 is 8,000 baht, including VAT.
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Capacity: Up to 500GB
Performance: Rotational Vibration Safeguard
Reliability: 400G operating shock Best protection against bumps and rough handling 1,000G non-operating shock; Thermal Fly-height Control (TFC) and TrueTrack Technology
Power: 1.9W read/write and 0.7W idle
Acoustics: Quiet acoustics
Interface: SATA 3Gb/s
Security Option: Bulk Data Encryption (1.5 Gb/s SATA)
Dimensions (width/depth/height): 70 by 100 by 12.5mm
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