Hitachi Travelstar Z7K500 Hard Drives

Hitachi announced the 500GB, Travelstar Z7K500 internal hard drive, claiming to be the fastest and highest capacity, one-disk, 7,200 RPM HDD on the market. All Hitachi Z-series drives can serve as a direct replacement for standard, 2.5-inch 9.5mm hard drives. They feature common connectors and mounting points for simple integration into existing systems, and enable greater design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new, thinner, lighter and more robust devices.

The new 7,200 RPM Travelstar Z7K500 family offers reliable, high-performance, low-power, exceptional shock resistance and quiet acoustics. With an industry-first 6Gb/s SATA interface, as well as a 32MB cache and 7,200 RPMs, the new thin and rugged Travelstar Z7K500 delivers up to 33 percent more performance in PCMark Vantage testing than other 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.

Delivering the right balance of power and acoustics, the new 7,200 RPM Travelstar Z7K500 family features 1.8 watts (W) read/write power and 0.8W low-power idle, and delivers a nearly silent operation at 2.3 idle/2.4 seek bels. They also feature Advanced Format, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.

Optional Travelstar Z7K500 drive models are available, including a self encrypting drive (SED) designed to meet the highest standards for protecting data, and an enhanced-availability (EA) model for applications needing around-the-clock data access in lower-transaction environments. The SED model encrypts data in real time using protected keys, providing users the highest level of data protection available. It also speeds and simplifies drive re-purposing. By deleting the encryption key, the data on the drive is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming data-overwrite.

With Hitachi Z-series drives, manufacturers can utilize space savings to design thinner devices, increase shock robustness, improve unplugged time by using a larger battery or allow for enhanced cooling and air flow due to the thinner HDD design.

Price and Availabililty
The Hitachi Travelstar Z7K500 (check prices) hard drives come in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities, coming March 2012. See datasheet (pdf) for specifications.