Introduction

Hitachi has announced today that they are expanding their line of Travelstar high-performance 2.5-in notebook HDDs with the addition of their fastest performers yet, the new 7K500 series. Available in capacities up to 500GB, the latest addition to the already popular line of portable hard drives for laptops is sure to have those craving super-fast performance and eco-friendly energy consumption jumping for joy. The Hitachi 7K500 series offers up a 16% increase in speed over the 7K320 series and is said to have nearly inaudible operation.

The new Hitachi 7K500 series of 7200-RPM notebook HDDs represent the company’s highest capacity notebook storage to-date and the increased space doesn’t come at the expense of speed or its 16MB cache. Media transfer rates for the new drives have been increased to 1245Mb/s, while the power consumption has been corralled to 1.8W during read or write processes and a measly 0.69W on standby. All capacities of the 7K500 series include the bulk data encryption (BDE) variants and interface via 3Gb/s SATA connections. Shock resistance is rated at 400G during operation or 1000G when turned off.