Travelstar Z5K500 First One Disk 7 mm Thick 500 GB HDD from Hitachi

Interesting ! really interesting news from Hitachi these days , after the new HDD high density technology unveiled few weeks ago now a new HDD for laptops with 500GB capacities and guess what , its a single disk hard drive .

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its new 500GB, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z5K500 drive - the industry's highest capacity, one-disk, 7 millimeter (mm) z-height hard disk drive (HDD).

 

According to IDC, 500GB, mobile 2.5-inch drives represent 22 percent of the market today, with this capacity growing 42 percent annually from 2010 to 2013. Offered in a complete family of 500GB, 320GB and 250GB, which satisfies more than 77 percent of today's capacity needs in the portable PC market, these drives are the industry's only second-generation family of 5,400 RPM, 7mm z-height drives, which are designed as a direct replacement for standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives in everything from external drives to laptops, netbooks and blade servers. All this combined puts the new Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family in the industry sweet spot of opportunity in the mobile 2.5-inch market. 

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. With the broadest line of 7,200 and 5,400 RPM 7mm drives now at their fingertips, Hitachi customers can differentiate product lines by utilizing space savings to produce thinner devices, add battery capacity, increase shock robustness, or improve internal airflow - all better uses of the volume in a system than shipping a partially "empty" 9.5mm 2.5-inch hard drive with only one disk.

 

Delivering the right balance of power and acoustics, the drives feature 1.8 watts (W) read/write power and 0.55W low power idle, and deliver a nearly silent operation at 1.9 idle / 2.1 seek bels, which is quieter than most ambient noise in a household. All Travelstar Z5K500 drives feature an 8 MB cache and a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface. They are also Hitachi's second 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.

 

All Hitachi Z-series 7mm drives feature common connectors and mounting points for standard integration into existing systems, and enable greater design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new thinner, lighter and more robust devices. 

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