Hitachi’s Fast Notebook Drives Hit 200 GB

Hitachi is now shipping its 200GB, 7,200 RPM, 2.5-inch TravelStar notebook hard drives, including a version with hard-disk level encryption.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is now shipping what it claims is the industry’s largest, highest-performing notebook hard drive in the form of its 200 GB, 7,200 RPM TravelStar 7K200 2.5-inch hard drive for notebook computers. Offering twice the capacity and a 22 percent performance improvement over its predecessor, the 7K200 is available immediately as an option in selected Dell and Alienware—meaning customers looking at notebooks which support dual hard drive configurations can now opt for up to 400 GB of onboard storage.

Hitachi is also offering the E7K200 model, which offers Hitachi’s hard disk-level Bulk Data Encryption technology, a key-based system which Hitachi claims offers better security and performance than software-based encryption. Ironically, the Bulk Data Encryption technology may make the drives easier to throw away, since they won’t have to be erased first: just delete the encryption key, and the drive becomes inaccessible to anyone.

“The 7200 RPM Travelstar is the rock star of our mobile hard drive family both for its technical merits and its desirability,” said Hitachi Global Storage Technologies’ Shinjiro Iwata in a statement. “The enthusiastic response to date confirms that consumers are ever more sophisticated in their notebook requirements and that the Travelstar has become a status symbol among notebook aficionados.”

The SATA drives can tolerate 350 Gs of operating shock (1000 Gs of non-operating shock), offer a 4.2 ms average latency, 10ms/11ms read and write times, and the non-encrypted versions sport a 1 Watt active idle mode. The 7K200 should be available directly to consumers in coming months at a suggested price of $249.