Hitachi has announced the world’s first 2.5″ 500GB harddrive, expanding the possibilities for portable solutions even further. Hitachi have taken some shortcuts with Travelstar 5K500 though. Instead of optimizing the storage density it simply fit an additional platter inside the case. This has boosted storage capacity quite a lot, but also made the drive 3mm thicker than most other models. The industry standard is 9.5mm, and something most laptops are built for, which means that the 12.5mm thick Travelstar 5K500 simply won’t fit inside many laptop cases.
Component manufacturer ASUS has already announced that it, together with Hitachi, is working on a new laptop using two Travelstar 5K500 harddrive to reach 1TB of storage.
“Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced that ASUS has integrated Hitachi’s Travelstar 5K500 hard drive into its new M50 and M70 notebook PCs, the latter of which delivers up to 1TB of storage capacity in a two-drive configuration. The companies are breaking new ground in personal computing by combining industry-leading storage capacity – exceeding that of a typical desktop system – with the portability of a notebook PC.”
The storage capacity of modern laptops is growing fast, but it would be nice to see some regular-sized 2.5″ 500GB drives sometime soon.
Technical specifications: Travelstar 5K500
400/500 GB
12.5 mm in height
5400 RPM
260 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
3 glass disk platter (s)
6 TMR recording head(s)
1000 G/1ms non-operating shock
400 G/2ms operating shock
5.5 ms average latency
12 ms average read time
0.95 W active idle
0.7 W low-power idle
1.8 W idle power (EA version only)
Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s, 1.5Gb/s encrypted
148 grams in weight
2.2 Bels typical idle acoustics
2.4 Bels typical operational acoustics
