At 7mm, Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 is the world’s thinnest 500GB, 2.5-inch hard drive
Hitachi today announced its new 500GB, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z5K500 drive – the industry’s highest capacity, one-disk, 7mm z-height hard disk drive. The drive is designed for portable computers like netbooks and tablets. 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.
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. The drive also has an 8MB cache, a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface and physical sector size of 4,096 bytes (up to 512 bytes), thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.
Travelstar Z-series family features optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security.
It comes in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB storage capacities and will be shipping to select distributors in December.
P.S. Hitachi also announced that the Travelstar Z5K500 is used in G-Technology’s newest G-DRIVE Slim series external hard drive. The 500GB G-Technology G-DRIVE slim will be shipping to retailers in early Q1 2011. Pricing has not been set.
