Less than a month ago, Hitachi announced its 2TB hard drive for desktops. The company on Tuesday brought the same speed to its newest Travelstar hard drive for laptops.
The new hard drive is called Travelstar 7K500. This is a 500GB, 2.5-inch, SATA 2 (3Gb/s) hard drive designed for high-performance notebooks and external storage solutions. The new Travelstar 7K500, according to Hitachi, delivers up to 56 percent higher capacity and 16 percent better application performance than its predecessors. It also comes with Hitachi's new technologies designed to withstand shocks and vibration, and offers better power management and security.
The new 7200 RPM TravelStar hard drive.
(Credit: Hitachi)As with previous generations of the Travelstar hard drive, like the Travelstar 5K500.B, the Travelstar 7K500 comes optional with hardware-based bulk data encryption (BDE). However, it's one of the first that's compliant with the Trusted Computing Group's (TCG) Opal storage security specification. This is a new open standard designed to protect data in the event of system loss or theft.
(Hitachi BDE, much like the Seagate's full disk encrytion, is a hardware-based encryption provided as an option for hard drives. Once enabled, the hard drive will encrypt all data that comes from the system as it is written to the media. When read back, the drive decrypts the data so that it can be understood by the system. Since the hard drive is doing the encryption work, there is no impact on the operating system's performance. In case of loss or theft, the data can be automatically deleted, rendering the hard drive unreadable.)
Hitachi claims that the new Travelstar 7K500 has been designed for energy efficiency with power consumption as low as 0.69 watts when idle and 1.8 watts during operation. The drive also offer halogen-free design and RoHS compliance.
The new Travelstar 7K500 comes in 120GB, 160GB, 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB capacities. It's currently only available to OEMs but you can get your own sometime later this month with the 500GB version costing $160.
If you are a fan of notebook hard drives with hardware-level encryption, apart from Seagate, you now can turn to Hitachi.
The company announced on Tuesday the third generation of its 2.5-inch Travelstar hard drive with built-in encryption, the Travelstar 5K500.B. This is a 5400rpm, SATA II hard drive that comes in capacities ranging from 120GB to 500GB, and is designed for notebook PCs, external storage, gaming consoles, as well as other mobile and enterprise applications.
(Credit:
Hitachi)
Considering the wide range of implementation, the new hard drive comes in a few versions. The one for notebooks focuses on low power consumption. The version used for enterprise has Hitachi's Enhanced Availability technology that lets the drive operate 24 hours a day at high-speed.
Nonetheless, according to Hitachi, its new drive features a halogen-free design, consumes less energy, and is more eco-friendly than other drives of the same type.
The new Travelstar 5K500.B's features optional hard-drive-level Bulk Data Encryption. The "optional" notation means that customers need to ask for the data encryption feature to be turned on at the manufacturer. This is because, according to Hitachi, in some markets such as China or Russia, special permits are required to buy or use hard drives with built-in encryption.
With BDE, the data is scrambled using a key as it is written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved, giving users transparent protection. It also helps simplify the drive redeployment process. By deleting the encryption key, the data is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for the time-consuming data-wiping process.
The new TravelStar 5K500.B drive is slated to be available sometime next month. Currently, it's unclear how much the drive will cost.
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