Hitachi announced the new Travelstar Z5K500, the industry’s highest capacity, one-disk, 7 millimeter (mm) z-height hard disk drive with 500GB capacity. The 2.5-inch drive uses SATA 3Gb/s interface and has 8MB cache memory. It operates at 5400RPM and features generation Advanced Format drive, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.
The 7mm Travelstar Z5K500 includes optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security. It is available in 250GB, 320GB and 500GB capacities and Hitachi also offers Enhanced Availability (EA) models in capacities of 320GB and 500GB, which are designed and fine-tuned for applications needing “always-on” protection in 24×7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems.
With its slim profile and high capacities, 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. It will be released in December. Hitachi will also releases the 500GB G-DRIVE slim 2.5-inch external hard drive.
