Hitachi's Travelstar Z7K500: 500GB Of High-Performance, Slimline Storage For Notebooks

Hitachi has announced its new Travelstar Z7K500 series of hard disk drives. These are 7mm-thick slimline designs serving up to 500GB of data on just one platter. A platter rotating at 7200 RPM, at that. This is a new combination for this type of hard drive, and folks with one of those newfangled notebooks that only support these slender hard drives now have another option to increase their performance and storage capacity.

The Travelstar Z7K500 series also contains 320GB and 250GB variants alongside the flagship 500GB model. All have a 32MB cache and a SATA 6Gbps interface, both pretty new for notebook drives in general. Hitachi claims a 171MB/s maximum transfer rate, which is most likely through the cache rather than off the platter surface. In traditional Hitachi fashion, the drives are also available with full-disk encryption technology or assured for “Enhanced Availability,” which is Hitachi-speak for models prepped for data servers.

Anyway, you can expect members of the Travelstar Z7K500 series to hit store shelves sometime next month, at the latest.

UPDATE: The Travelstar Z7K500 is now available here at Amazon and other online retailers.

(Via Hitachi Global Storage Technologies)