Both new Hitachi drives should be available shortly: The new Travelstar 7K320 is a 2.5” Serial ATA hard drive that spins at a fast 7,200 RPM. While enthusiast users might be looking at Flash SSDs for performance reasons, no Flash SSD will be able to offer more than 128 GB capacity at high performance until the end of the year. And even these are highly unaffordable, costing $2,500 or up. The new 320-GB, high-performance Travelstar should stay well below $300. As opposed to the Travelstar 5K500, which is based on three platters, the 7K320 runs on two platters. Hitachi states an access time of 12 ms, which should translate into an average access time of less than 17 ms. The SATA interface supports 150 MB/s and 300 MB/s speeds, although the latter do not provide noticeable advantage, yet empty your notebook battery a little earlier.
