Fujitsu ships 100 GByte 2.5" SATA drive

Chicago (IL) - Fujitsu announced that it will begin shipping its 100 GByte 2.5" harddrive with SATA interface this month. The devices answer a growing demand for SATA drives in the notebooks and will show up in products at the end of this year or early 2006.

After having announced the drive as first 2.5" SATA drive already back in January, Fujitsu said that it is now ready to ship the device into the market. The model series MHV2xxBH product line has been available with sizes of 40, 60 and 80 GByte and now offers 100 GByte capacity as MHV2100BH.

The new 5400 rpm drive integrates a hardware accelerator to improve native command queuing (NCQ) performance as well as a lower consumption than comparable drives, Fujitsu claims. The drive uses 5 watts during spin up, 1.9 watts during read and write processes, 0.6 watts when idle and 0.13 watts on standby. Acoustic noise is about 2.6 bels when idle.

If just capacity is concerned, 100 GByte of space is on the way of becoming mainstream. Fujitsu and also Seagate recently announced 120 GByte versions of their 2.5" drives with Ultra ATA/100 interface.