New Hitachi HDD Could Lead to 4TB and 5TB

Thursday Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced its new 2.5-inch, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z-series family of hard drives. According to the company, the 500 GB version offers the industry's highest capacity for a single-platter, 7-mm thick hard drive. This is accomplished by using the sixth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters which feature a higher areal density (636Gb/inch2) than current hard drives.

With that said, Hitachi's new drive could pave the way to 3.5-inch HDD capacities higher than the current 3 TB limit. This would require using 3.5-inch platters with 636Gb/inch2 areal density, providing around 1 TB each. It's quite possible that within the next twelve months, we could see a 4-platter HDD offering a massive 4 TB capacity whereas a 5-platter HDD could offer 5 TB. For 2.5-inch form factor drives, consumers could see future models with 1 TB or 1.5 TB capacities using two and three platters.

As for Hitachi's new line of Travelstar Z5K500 drives, the series offers 500 GB, 320 GB and 250 GB models. Other feature include the previously reported 5,400 RPM spindle speed, a Serial ATA-300 interface and an 8 MB cache buffer. The drives also feature 1.8 watts read/write power, 0.55 watts low power idle, 5.5-ms average latency and 13-ms average read seek time.

"Travelstar Z-series family features optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security," the company said, "When employing BDE, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then de-scrambled with the key as it is retrieved. The Travelstar Z5K500 drive family will also be offered in Enhanced Availability (EA) models in capacities of 320 GB and 500 GB, which are designed and fine-tuned for applications needing “always-on” protection in 24x7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems."

The Travelstar Z5K500 family will be shipping to select distributors this month. The company is also shipping an external version of the 2.5-inch Travelstar Z5K500 500 GB drive in early Q1 2011. Called the G-Technology G-Drive slim, its massive 500 GB provides an ideal storage solution for Apple's Macbook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

"Now at 500GB, the drive has enough room to store Up to 125 hours of high-definition video, 500 hours of standard video, 178 movies, 125,000 4-minute songs or 250 games," the company said. "Formatted for Macs with simple plug n’ play connectivity, the G-DRIVE slim is Time Machine ready for added backup protection. It is USB-powered, so there is no need to carry around an extra power cord."

  • warezme
    yo drive is so fat, when it hauls ass..., it takes two trips
    Reply
  • dgingeri
    I want to get 8 of these 500GB laptop drives and RAID6 them together. That's a fast 3TB array. I'd love to have that for my main storage.
    Reply
  • apache_lives
    dgingeriI want to get 8 of these 500GB laptop drives and RAID6 them together. That's a fast 3TB array. I'd love to have that for my main storage.
    Ever heard of an SSD?
    Reply
  • nevertell
    A single SSD might even be faster, but if it brakes down, it's down. And how much would a 3 tb ssd cost anyway ?
    Reply
  • belardo
    Not as fast as SSD... but the amount of storage is a lot more. But 2.5
    " drives are not made for massive RAID... 4 2TB drives would cost less and have better performance than these 2.5" drives with far more storage space.

    Reply
  • nforce4max
    4tb might last me a year tops before I am out of space again.
    Reply
  • retrig
    dgingeriI want to get 8 of these 500GB laptop drives and RAID6 them together. That's a fast 3TB array. I'd love to have that for my main storage.They're only 5400 RPM drives though.
    Reply
  • aaron88_7
    apache_livesEver heard of an SSD?I don't even want to think about how much it would cost for that much storage in SSD form!
    Reply
  • Darkk
    Sorry I do not trust Hitachi drives even it was given to me for free. They may lead the way for new technologies but when it comes to relibablity I don't trust them.

    Darkk
    Reply
  • joytech22
    aaron88_7I don't even want to think about how much it would cost for that much storage in SSD form!
    I think 1TB alone cost's $3000 USD!
    Reply