Chicago (IL) - Hitachi increased the capacity of its Travelstar notebook harddrives. The consumer-targeted 5K100 and E5K100 for enterprise applications offer up to 100 GByte of space and comes with native Serial ATA support.

The new 2.5" drives maintain the 5400 rpm speed of previous models and will first appear in desktop replacement notebooks, according to Hitachi. Compared to notebook harddrives in the past which exclusively focused on high capacity and performance, the new generation also is equipped to extend the battery life, achieve lower acoustics levels and higher shock resistance, the company said.

Both new drives pick up a trend of Serial ATA (SATA) now moving into the 2.5" segment and increase bandwidth beyond 100 Mbit/second. Native SATA is included in both announced drives. Hitachi believes that the blade server device category will see the greatest benefit from SATA support on 2.5" drives due to an opportunity to enhance air flow and reduce system complexity.

While the 5K100 is a mainstream stream drive, the E5K100 is smaller and features lower heat emission as well as power consumption (0.6 W compared to 0.85 W). Both drives are available in configurations of 40 GByte, 60 GByte, 80 GByte, and 100 GByte with PATA and SATA interfaces. The drives come with either one (40 GByte) or two glass disk platter and areal densities of 70 and 86 Gbit/square inch. Average latency is posted at 5.5 ms, average seek time at 12 ms.

Pricing for the 5K100 is set at a suggested price of $126 for the 40 GByte version, $170 for the 60 GByte version, $222 for the 80 GByte version and $263 for the 100 GByte version