Hitachi unveils first 500GB drive for notebooks
How much hard-drive capacity can you fit into a 2.5-inch space? Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) ups the ante with the debut of what it’s calling the world’s highest-capacity mobile hard drive. The half-terabyte (500GB) Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 internal hard drive is targeted for use in “slim” desktops, full-featured notebooks, and gaming consoles. The Travelstar 5K500, available in either a 400GB or 500GB model, is the fourth-generation Hitachi mobile drive to use perpendicular magnetic recording technology to deliver breakthrough capacity and reliability. The drive is available with a 3.0Gbps Serial ATA (SATA) interface.
The Travelstar 5K500 offers some innovative features, such the Hitachi-patented Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology, which acts as an “early warning” system for the drive, enabling it to sense a possible disturbance (such as vibrations within the system enclosure) in advance and take the necessary steps to stabilize the drive head and avoid any disruptions. The hard drive also features 400G shock protection. Hitachi is also jumping on the “green” wagon. The Travelstar 5K500 uses a three-disk design, but uses only as much power as its two-disk predecessor, the 5K250, making the new drive relatively energy-efficient. The Travelstar 5K500 features a 1.9 watt read/write power draw, and its 0.7 watt low power idle means longer battery life for notebooks. It wasn’t that long ago when I admired a 120GB drive in my laptop as something really hi-tech and it looks like a pretty outdated piece of hardware now…
Source: PCMag, Cnet
Comments(39)
I don’t see how anyone could fill up a LAPTOP with that much space. I struggle with my 320GB as it is.
i’d love this for my coffee machine!
Nice…
Next stop Jupiter!!!
I wouldn’t mind one for my laptop.Depending on the price.
I have a 320 GB boot drive and a 750GB storage drive and I’m always deleting stuff so i have enough room.
i have a 1TB external harddrive and it’s full… full full full. and i only keep dvdrips and 320 kbps music
They’ve made the HD itself bigger, so it’s kind of cheating. The race was primarily to make the HD’s bigger within the “standard” format, so this is 500Gb nonstandard.
OUCH
The basic 500Gb drive will cost about $399 in the US, Hitachi said.
The extra platter means the drive is physically larger than previous models: 12.5 millimeters thick versus 9.5mm for most current 2.5-inch drives. That means it won’t fit in the drive space in many laptop computers,
The 5,400-rpm drive offers a 5.5-millisecond average latency and 12-millisecond average read time. It comes with a SATA (Serial ATA) interface that supports 3G bps (bits per second) data transfer although this drops to 1.5G bps when the optical disc encryption is turned on. The drive consumers 0.95 watts at idle and 0.7 watts at low-power idle, which is only slightly more than Hitachi’s previous two platter laptop drives,
Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/hardware/laptops/news/index.cfm?newsid=6805
woo hoo more portable p0rn, if u can afford it!!! lol
Don’t you think that technology is just amazing?
Why not just buy an external hard drive????
I have a 200gb hard drive in my ASUS laptop, plenty of space, and an external.
Might have a lot of capacity but what RPM does it spin at? I highly doubt its even 5400…
Macbook pros only come with 160gigs max.
can u fit these into a macbookpro?
does leopard os even have support for a hdd this large?
don’t you guys think the industry is taking a wrong approach on storage? I rather see companies trying to reduce and compress the freaking info, good Maths is all that is required, no more stupid capacity
this would kick some butt in a mac mini or a imac. or in the totally rockin macbook pro i want
It’s nice to finally see a HD with big capacity voor laptops
Else u need to buy an external and u need to take more with you than only your laptop
I don’t think my HD is big enough to download this
BTW, solid state discs are way to go for laptops. less weight, less noise, less heat, higher battery life, and soon to be faster then raptor itself. I don’t get you guys, why do you need that much space? You download whatever, see it, hear it, try it, delete it. If you need it again for some reason you can dl it again but this hardly ever happen. Do you really go back and re-watch so many movies over and over again? Tell me, as it is enigma for me, how do you fill out 1TB with useful stuff.
y is it mostly Hitachi making better hard disks?I can only dream for it to be in my future laptop.
i buy only 7200x disks, so biggest is 100Gb!
It’s very pretty but $400…ouch! When are they going to come out with a 500gb solid state drive, now that would be impressive! Instant read/write times.
i buy only 7200x disks, so biggest is 100Gb!
welcome to yesterday….
Yeah price is high RIGHT NOW, will be cheaper aftewards, specially when other manufacturers offer their 500GB drives
xopa.
this one’s RPM 5400, really wish it was 7200 like hitachi’s new 7200-rpm-160/200GB travelstar, there’s a big difference between the two if you paly new games,copy lots of big files….
fast hard drives dont give games higher frame rates, but faster loading times.
sweet but it’s probably going to be really pricy
Well,as long as it’s 4200rpm it sucks, i had 4200rpm it ttake loke 2 min to boot up the whole windows for FZ190 CTO with 2.6 core 2 due 3.5 gigz ram,so i replaced it with 200gb 7200rpm, it boots hell fast,in 10sec,4200rpm sucks that all even if it’s 1/2 terabyte,dont go for it if u use laptop for media, or u have high transfer rate daily
Doesn’t seem to smart to use half a terabyte just to have it crash on you after using it a week and all the collected data.
Best to have a backup harddrive to save the important info.
The density of the drive should make up for the lack of rotaional speed
Damn, I only recently bought a Fujitsu 250GB 5400rpm drive for my PS3. I decided 5400rpm was better than the 300GB at 4200rpm.
500GB would’ve been so sweet. Oh well, I’ll just buy it when it comes out. I will need it when the PS3 becomes a DVR later this year.
How P!ssed off r u when your 200 gig HD crashes and u lose stuff. Times that by 5
Er no, simple maths says times that by 2.5
200 * 2.5 = 500
200 * 5 = 1000
We’re talking about 500GB here not close to 1TB.
Why oh why did they have to put that motherhubbing vibration sensor in it? Freck! Now it wont work on an of my laptops…
For the macboys: No, this will never work under OS X AT ALL. See my comment above for reason why.
Would be a nice alternative for the PS3. Hope that extra physical size doesnt make it too big to fit. I’ll wait for it to go down from the $400 price as well seeing as i could get a 500Gb external drive for $100
nice. crashprone hitachis. more data to lose …
Ouch…. ~(@)+(@)~
One can never have too much HD space.
It’s 3mm thicker. That probably won’t fit in the PS3’s drive rack. Damn…
Have to wait and see what Fujitsu come up with, they were the first to make a 300GB. Apart from these new Hitachi’s 400GB and 500GB, I don’t think any other companies are breaking 250GB.
I have 100GB on my notebook and get by just fine
Of course I have
3 X 750GB, 1 X 320 GB external drives
1 X 120GB WD portable external
1 X 120 network drive
and 500GB in my desktop (with another 500 being added in the morning so I can setup a raid)
I prefer to keep my notebook dynamic (keeping only copies of stuff I want to watch on the go), since you carry it around all the time, I would not want to use it as a primary storage device. I’d to lose a TB of data in a single bump, or theft.
Meant: I’d hate to lose a TB of Data …
@ #7 $399 thats alright cause within a blink of an eye it’ll be down to $199. Now HD’s are soooo cheap 500GB (3.5″) will set you back around approx $150 US dollars, which is chicken feed.