Hitachi (News - Alert) Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has begun shipping its fourth-generation 7,200 RPM mobile hard drive, the Travelstar 7K320. Providing 60 percent higher capacity than its predecessor, the new drive improves the power consumption by 22 percent and performance by 12 percent. The experience of watching movies or listening to music on a notebook PC is now more enhanced with the new drive’s quiet acoustics.

 

The Travelstar 7K320 provides many benefits for the users. Its features include operating shock protection of 400Gs to minimize the effects of rough handling and vibration, power usage on par with Hitachi's 5,400 RPM mobile drives, noticeably faster startup and application performance, and 320GB capacity for storing approximately 80 hours of high definition video, 320 hours of standard video, 100 movies, 80,000 4-minute MP3s or 160 games.

 

With the performance of the Travelstar 7K320, customers can now look to get a full-featured notebook or compact desktop model and still achieve all the capacity and performance of a desktop PC. The new drives are packed with a number of features that are often demanded by the manufacturers of notebooks, compact desktops, gaming systems, blade servers and video surveillance systems. Some of these features include best-in-class operating shock protection of 400Gs, 5,400 RPM-equivalent power consumption and quiet acoustics.

 

The Travelstar 7K320 features optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE). Previously, either software-based encryption or a system-level password was used to protect data on a hard drive. Customers get improved performance and a higher level of security than any of the previously available methods with the hard drive level encryption.

 

“As operating systems have grown more complex, users have struggled with an overall decrease in system performance,” said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “Solid state drives (SSD) have yet to deliver an overall increase in speed, and certainly not at an affordable price. The 7,200 RPM speed of the Travelstar 7K320 provides an improved overall experience, at the capacities users want and at a far lower cost than SSD”