Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced the Travelstar 7K500, its fifth-generation, 7200 RPM mobile hard disk drive which is design for notebook, gaming system and professional external storage solutions.
The Travelstar 7K500 is a 2.5-inch 500GB hard drive that uses 3Gb/s SATA interface and offers a 7,200 rpm spin-speed. The Travelstar 7K500 also offers hardware-based Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) as an option and is the first mobile drives to be compliant with the Trusted Computing Group’s (TCG) Opal storage security specification.
Hitachi’s 7K500 is designed for energy efficiency with a low power consumption at 0.69 watts idle power and 1.8 watts during read/write operations. It is now available for top tier OEMs. Other capacities include 120GB, 160GB, 250GB and 320GB and Hitachi will release in November an enhanced-availability (EA) version that s specifically designed for applications requiring 24×7 operation in lower transaction environments like blade servers, network routers and surveillance systems.
