Hitachi launches super-thin 500GB notebook HDD

Earlier this week, Hitachi came up with a 3TB drive and now another sleek hard drive.

The 2,5″, 7 mm “thick” Travelstar Z5K500 series hard drives will be available with capacities of 250, 320 and 500 GB. The single-plate HDDs, spinning at 5400 rpm, equipped with a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface and 8 MB cache memory, consume only 1,8 Watts during writing/reading. They support Advanced Format technology, i.e. they use a 4kB sector size. Its sound output even during search – which is one of the loudest operations – is only 21 dBA, for those who would not even have that enough, they can also request the drives with a built-in data encryption service.

Smaller models of the Travelstar Z5K500 will be available from this month, but the 500-gig (marketed as G-Technology G-Drive) is intended for portable winchesters and will only be available in early 2011.