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Spinning Disks Aren't Standing Still |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Tuesday, 15 May 2007 |
With the threat of
Solid State technology looming, it's imperative that makers of spinning
magnetic disk drives for laptop computers continue to make significant
gains in terms of speed and capacity. Looks like they will have no
trouble keeping ahead of the SSD performance curve.
While solid
state technology has it all over traditional disk drives when it comes
to speed, they can't beat out disk drives in terms of capacity and cost
- at least not yet. And if this latest drive from Hitachi is any
indication, it could take Solid State technology a long time to close
the gap.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi) has begun
shipping the industry's highest-capacity, highest-performing notebook
hard drive ever and along with a doubling of capacity over its earlier
Travelstar drives, the new devices manage a 22-percent performance
improvement as well as optional optional hard-drive level "Bulk Data
Encryption"..
The 200GB, 7200 RPM Travelstar 7K200 will find a
luxury home in Dell and Alienware systems in the first instance with
immediate availability on all Dell's high-performance XPS notebooks and
on all its Alienware gaming notebooks.
Users looking to bulk up
on storage can walk around with dual hard drive configurations of 400GB
on the Aurora m9700 and the XPS M2010.
"The 7200 RPM Travelstar is the rock star of our mobile hard drive
family both for its technical merits and its desirability," said
Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage
Technologies.
"The enthusiastic response to date confirms that
consumers are ever more sophisticated in their notebook requirements
and that the Travelstar has become a status symbol among notebook
aficionados. As the industry's only third-generation 7200 RPM product,
we believe the Travelstar 7K200 will continue to accelerate this trend," he said.
The 7200 RPM category of the 2.5-inch hard drive segment is
considered the platinum class of notebook hard drives, designed for the
most discriminating users, says Hitachi.
Despite its higher
motor spin speed, the 7200 RPM drive offers comparable power
consumption, heat emission and acoustics to its 5400 RPM counterparts,
says Hitachi and the drive is also designed to withstand a shock of up
to 350 Gs giving users better data protection
from vibration, bumps and drops than any other competitive hard drive.
Hitachi
believes this high-performance product category (2.5-inch 7200 RPM hard
drives) will account for 40 percent of all notebook hard drives shipped
in 2010, representing a 25-percent compounded annual growth rate since
2005. Today, 7200 RPM products represent roughly 10 percent of total
2.5-inch shipments. The Travelstar 7K200 uses Hitachi's
third-generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology.
Hitachi says the Travelstar 7K200 will give users 18-33 percent faster application performance than its competitors.
Another benefit that the Travelstar 7K200 offers with hard-drive level
security is in the data-erasing process. Today, hard drives must either
be physically destroyed or the existing data must be written over and
over - a time-consuming process using a software tool - before it can
be safely discarded without fear of data piracy or identity theft.
Bulk Data Encryption would make data-erasing unnecessary when a hard
drive needs to be discarded. By simply deleting the encryption key, the
hard drive is rendered unreadable and, thus, safe from prying eyes.
www.hitachigst.com
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