Hitachi GST shipping Travelstar Z7K500 hard drive

SAN JOSE, USA: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has shipped more than 25 million Travelstar Z-series, 7 millimeter (mm) z-height, 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDD), enabling a new era of thin and light portable computers, ultra-compact CE devices and industrial systems.

The company also announced that it is now shipping its new 500GB, Travelstar Z7K500 drive – the industry’s fastest and highest capacity, one-disk, 7,200 RPM HDD. All Hitachi GST Z-series drives can serve as a direct replacement for standard, 2.5-inch 9.5mm hard drives. They feature common connectors and mounting points for simple integration into existing systems, and enable greater design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new, thinner, lighter and more robust devices.

Embraced by many of the top PC OEMs, the Ultrabook specification authored by Intel offers opportunities to create a compelling tablet-like computing experience in an ultra thin laptop design. In addition to providing a thin and light design, instant-on capabilities, and an extended battery life, PC OEMs must also create high-quality, cost-effective solutions to help drive competition, differentiation and mass adoption.

To help achieve this goal, a key part of Intel’s Ultrabook specification is combining a 7mm HDD with a SSD cache, giving OEMs the ability to explore the limits of modern ultra thin and light designs without sacrificing capacity, performance, battery life or quality. For instance, a Hitachi 7mm HDD combined with an SSD cache can help OEMs meet the Ultrabook specification for performance and start up times, while providing a high-capacity, space-efficient, and cost-effective solution. Based on Hitachi’s OEM customer plans, this combination is expected to ship in a significant majority of Ultrabooks in 2012.

The new 7,200 RPM Travelstar Z7K500 family delivers on the company’s proven strengths of reliability, high-performance, low-power, exceptional shock resistance and quiet acoustics. With an industry-first 6Gb/s SATA interface, as well as a 32MB cache and 7,200 RPMs, the new thin and rugged Travelstar Z7K500 delivers up to 33 percent more performance¹ in PCMark® Vantage testing than other 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.

Delivering the right balance of power and acoustics, the new 7,200 RPM Travelstar Z7K500 family features 1.8 watts (W) read/write power and 0.8W low-power idle, and delivers a nearly silent operation at 2.3 idle/2.4 seek bels. They also feature Advanced Format, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.

Optional Travelstar Z7K500 drive models are available, including a self encrypting drive (SED) designed to meet the highest standards for protecting data, and an enhanced-availability (EA) model for applications needing around-the-clock data access in lower-transaction environments.

The Travelstar Z7K500 family comes in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities. Qualification samples of the Travelstar Z7K500 family have been shipping since January; volume shipments will begin in March.