X

Hitachi announces high-speed 500GB laptop hard drive

Hitachi announces the new 7200 RPM Travelstar Drive for laptops that offers capacities up to 500GB.

Dong Ngo SF Labs Manager, Editor / Reviews
CNET editor Dong Ngo has been involved with technology since 2000, starting with testing gadgets and writing code for CNET Labs' benchmarks. He now manages CNET San Francisco Labs, reviews 3D printers, networking/storage devices, and also writes about other topics from online security to new gadgets and how technology impacts the life of people around the world.
See full bio
Dong Ngo
2 min read

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. 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.