500GB, Record Capacity by HGST for a 2.5-Inch HDD, But on Three Platters

On the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, at a time when most of the technology world is asking “what’s the next big thing?”,
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has answered that
question quite literally by introducing the world’s highest capacity
2.5-inch mobile hard drive. Setting a new industry benchmark for
capacity, the half-terabyte (500GB) Travelstar 5K500 is poised to usher
in a new era of “slim” desktops, full-featured notebooks, gaming
consoles and other advanced applications for consumers on-the-go.

With the Travelstar 5K500, Hitachi GST has effectively eliminated
the “capacity compromise” by offering consumers all the storage
capacity of a desktop with the portability and convenience of a
notebook. Moreover, the new drives are well-suited for use in “slim”
desktops, where users are seeking high-capacities in a space-saving,
small form factor enclosure. These new sleek PC designs are highly
desirable among today’s consumers who are often placing computers in
multiple rooms throughout the home.

The Travelstar 5K500, available in either a 400GB or 500GB model, is
the fourth-generation Hitachi mobile drive to use perpendicular
magnetic recording technology to deliver breakthrough capacity and
reliability. The half-terabyte drives can store up to 500 hours of
digital video, 178 feature length movies, 250 games or 125,000
four-minute songs. Travelstar 5K500 drives are available with a 3.0Gb/s
Serial ATA (SATA) interface for enhanced system performance.

Hitachi will also offer an enhanced-availability (EA) version,
called the Travelstar E5K500 — also available in both 400GB and 500GB
capacities — which is designed for applications requiring 24×7
operation in lower transaction environments, such as blade servers,
network routers, point-of-sale terminals and video surveillance systems.

“The Travelstar 5K500 was designed to address some important trends
taking place in today’s notebook computing market,” said Larry Swezey,
director, Consumer and Commercial HDD, Hitachi Global Storage
Technologies. “Consumers tend to think of their notebooks as less of a
pure technology tool and more of a mobile entertainment device for
taking large libraries of movies, music, games and pictures on the go.
As a result, notebooks are now starting to ship with wide, high
definition screens and large, high quality speakers for playing digital
audio and video. Hitachi’s new Travelstar 5K500 responds to these
dynamics with the features, design innovations and technologies that
enhance the overall entertainment experience.”

The Travelstar 5K500 is among Hitachi’s most technically advanced
and robust family of drives and includes an array of innovative
features, such Hitachi-patented Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS)
technology. RVS is designed for today’s full-featured notebooks that
commonly include premium speakers for enhancing the movie, music and
gaming experience. These speakers however, can inadvertently cause
vibrations within the system enclosure. To mitigate any adverse impact
on system performance, the Travelstar 5K500 uses RVS as an “early
warning” system for the drive, enabling it to sense a possible
disturbance in advance and take the necessary steps to stabilize the
drive head and avoid any disruptions. Additionally, the Travelstar
5K500 drives feature 400Gs of shock protection to further safeguard
user data from falls, bumps and rough handling.

The Travelstar 5K500 drives also feature optional Bulk Data
Encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security. Previously, data
on a hard drive could be protected either through software-based
encryption or a system-level password. However, hard-drive level
encryption provides improved performance and a higher level of security
than any of the previously available options. BDE models ship
exclusively with a 1.5Gb/s SATA interface.

Consumers have begun to demand environmentally responsible products
in all aspects of their lives. Hitachi has designed the Travelstar
5K500 to address these requirements without compromising performance
for power efficiency, or vice versa. While the Travelstar 5K500 uses a
three-disk design to deliver up to 500GB of capacity, the new drives
are extremely energy-efficient, with a power profile nearly identical
to its two-disk predecessor, the Travelstar 5K250. The new drives
feature a 1.9 watt read/write power draw and their 0.7 watt low power
idle means longer battery life for more “unplugged” notebook time.

“PC form factors are changing dramatically as PCs shift from
productivity tools to lifestyle devices,” according to Richard Shim,
Personal Computing Research Manager at IDC. “The most notable change is
the emergence of notebooks as the dominant PC form factor over
desktops. At the same time, desktops are slimming down without
sacrificing, and in some cases improving, performance. One key
component enabling this ‘less is more concept’ in PCs is hard drives,
which continue to increase in capacity, while maintaining their
relatively diminutive sizes.”

The Travelstar 5K500 will be available worldwide in February. The
Travelstar E5K500 will be available by the end of the second quarter,
2008.

Technical Specifications of the Travelstar 5K00