Looking for a bigger hard drive for your laptop? This might interest you: “Notebook PC disk storage leaps into the stratosphere today, hitting the half-terabyte mark with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies’ announcement of a 500GB 2.5-inch mobile hard drive. Due out in February 2008, the $400 Travelstar 5K500 drive will dramatically expand the capacity possible in today’s notebook PC designs.”
Hitachi’s announcement makes it the largest capacity mobile 2.5-inch hard drive. Previous high-water capacity marks for 2.5-inch drives included Fujitsu’s 300GB drive and Toshiba’s 320GB drive. Hitachi’s jump to 500GB represents a whopping 36 percent increase in a single bound. (Hitachi also announced a 400GB version for $350.)
Mondo Capacity
In order to achieve this landmark capacity, Hitachi didn’t so much advance areal density as it did rethink the drive’s design. Hitachi moved to a three platter design, as opposed to the typical two-platter approach for a 2.5-inch hard drive.
According to Hitachi, although the drive itself will occupy a 2.5-inch chassis, the drive mechanism inside the drive enclosure will be a bit thicker than the usual height of a drive. Typically, drives are 9.5mm in thickness; the 500GB drive will be 12.5mm, due to the additional disk platter.
The 5400rpm 500GB drive has 167GB per platter, the highest capacity per platter drive announced. Toshiba’s 320GB drive packs in 160GB per platter.
Notably, the power consumption of this drive is practically the same as that of Hitachi’s two-platter drive, the 5K250.
“We did not want consumers to sacrifice battery power in exchange for the increased capacity. We spent a lot of time designing the motor, and designing the electronics that control the motor and represent a large portion of the power consumption of a hard disk drive,” says Larry Swezey , director of consumer and commercial hard disk drive marketing at Hitachi.
New to this drive: Hitachi’s Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology. Explains Swezey: “On desktop drives and enterprise drives, when you put several drives together, a drive tends to pick up the rotational vibration produced by the motor of the drive or drives around it. That rotational vibration can cause disk read or write errors if the heads are unable to stay on track due to the vibrations. Drives with RVS add a sensor on the drive itself to detect such rotational vibration; RVS, in turn, controls the movement of the actuator–which moves the drive’s heads back and forth–to compensate for the vibration.”
The need for such technology has become increasingly apparent to Hitachi as consumer notebooks have gained improved speaker technology. “What we’ve found is that on consumer notebooks with large speakers, music playback can induce very similar types of vibration [to that caused by rotational vibration] and introduce read or write errors. The use of a rotational vibration sensor can help prevent those errors when the user is playing loud music, for example.”
Read the full article via PC World
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