Hitachi GST just announced that their new Travelstar 7K500 drive has started shipping to the first OEM’s; volume shipments should begin later this month. With the 7K500 Hitachi is catching up with Seagate’s Momentus drives that have been available for a while. The drive also faces competition from Toshiba in the high performance/low power segement: the latter started shipping their 512 GB Solid State Drive for notebooks about a month ago.
Hitachi Travelstar 7K500
Still, Hitachi is pretty happy with both the performance and power usage; the new drive offers a 16% performance improvement over the previous generation in tests using PC Mark Vantage. Power usage is pretty low, with the drive consuming 0.69 W when idle and 1.8 during read/write operations. In standby mode the power usage drops to 0.2 W.
The drive also supports encryption; Hitachi’s name for this feature is BDE (Bulk Data Encryption), and they claim this drive is one of the first mobile hard drives that conforms to the TCG’s Opal storage security specification.
The consumer-oriented version of the drive is available now in capacities of 120, 160, 250, 320 and 500 GB; a special version for applications where the drive is running 24×7 will be available in November in sizes starting at 160 GB. Hitachi specifically mentions that this “EA” version is meant for “operation in lower transaction environments”; so we won’t be seeing this drive in enterprise storage systems yet.
The drive has 16 MB of cache memory, and sports a 3 GB/s SATA interface. The full datasheet can be found on the Hitachi website.
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