Hitachi GST intros 7mm, 500GB hard drive

SAN JOSE, USA: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced its new 500GB, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z5K500 drive, touted to be the industry’s highest capacity, one-disk, 7 millimeter (mm) z-height hard disk drive (HDD).

According to IDC, 500GB, mobile 2.5-inch drives represent 22 percent of the market today, with this capacity growing 42 percent annually from 2010 to 2013.

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Offered in a complete family of 500GB, 320GB and 250GB, these drives are the industry’s only second-generation family of 5,400 RPM, 7mm z-height drives, which are designed as a direct replacement for standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives in everything from external drives to laptops, netbooks and blade servers.

The company claims that the Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family delivers the best 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.

The drives feature 1.8 watts (W) read/write power and 0.55W low power idle, deliver a nearly silent operation at 1.9 idle / 2.1 seek bels. All Travelstar Z5K500 drives feature an 8MB cache and a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface.

The company adds that they are also Hitachi’s second generation Advanced Format drive, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes.

Hitachi's new G-Technology G-Drive slim will levearage the new rugged, 7mm Travelstar Z5K500 drive, making it the thinnest 500GB, 2.5-inch external hard drive in the world.

The Travelstar Z5K500 family will be shipped to select distributors this month, whereas, the 500GB G-Technology G-DRIVE slim will be shipping to retailers in early Q1 2011. Pricing has not been set.