New Hitachi HDD Could Lead to 4TB and 5TB
Hitachi's new 2.5-inch HDD crams 500 GB onto one platter.
Thursday Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced its new 2.5-inch, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z-series family of hard drives. According to the company, the 500 GB version offers the industry's highest capacity for a single-platter, 7-mm thick hard drive. This is accomplished by using the sixth-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters which feature a higher areal density (636Gb/inch2) than current hard drives.
With that said, Hitachi's new drive could pave the way to 3.5-inch HDD capacities higher than the current 3 TB limit. This would require using 3.5-inch platters with 636Gb/inch2 areal density, providing around 1 TB each. It's quite possible that within the next twelve months, we could see a 4-platter HDD offering a massive 4 TB capacity whereas a 5-platter HDD could offer 5 TB. For 2.5-inch form factor drives, consumers could see future models with 1 TB or 1.5 TB capacities using two and three platters.
As for Hitachi's new line of Travelstar Z5K500 drives, the series offers 500 GB, 320 GB and 250 GB models. Other feature include the previously reported 5,400 RPM spindle speed, a Serial ATA-300 interface and an 8 MB cache buffer. The drives also feature 1.8 watts read/write power, 0.55 watts low power idle, 5.5-ms average latency and 13-ms average read seek time.
"Travelstar Z-series family features optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security," the company said, "When employing BDE, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then de-scrambled with the key as it is retrieved. The Travelstar Z5K500 drive family will also be offered in Enhanced Availability (EA) models in capacities of 320 GB and 500 GB, which are designed and fine-tuned for applications needing “always-on” protection in 24x7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems."
The Travelstar Z5K500 family will be shipping to select distributors this month. The company is also shipping an external version of the 2.5-inch Travelstar Z5K500 500 GB drive in early Q1 2011. Called the G-Technology G-Drive slim, its massive 500 GB provides an ideal storage solution for Apple's Macbook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
"Now at 500GB, the drive has enough room to store Up to 125 hours of high-definition video, 500 hours of standard video, 178 movies, 125,000 4-minute songs or 250 games," the company said. "Formatted for Macs with simple plug n’ play connectivity, the G-DRIVE slim is Time Machine ready for added backup protection. It is USB-powered, so there is no need to carry around an extra power cord."
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This is nice and all but i wish companies would spend more time getting SSD up to the capacity that normal hard drives have at similar prices. Thats where storage medium research should be going.
This is nice and all but i wish companies would spend more time getting SSD up to the capacity that normal hard drives have at similar prices. Thats where storage medium research should be going.
It's not because something new comes along, research into the old should be stopped. We didn't stop using penicillin after other antibiotics were found either, did we?
Face it, SSD's will take years to mature as mass storage device. NAND memory is still expensive to produce and cannot yet be manufactured in sufficient quantity, its reliability and information density isn't quite there yet,...
Meanwhile, regular HDD's become faster and especially larger all the time. I expect to see the 'SSD for frequently used apps, HDD for mass storage' division for years, perhaps even a decade. And even after that, I'm sure regular HDD's will continue to find a usage in certain niche applications.
Why do people always think current technology is useless because something new came along? We're still using 'legacy' standards every day and it's a good thing these are being improved alongside new technology.
Great if true, but I'd be surprised if we see them in the UK within 12 months. 3TB only just landed in shops here and most of those drives are grossly overpriced and many that I've seen only spin at 5400rpm... Been needing a new storage drive for a while but I'm waiting until there's a drive that won't cost the earth and isn't so slow that backing up my files won't take days.
Meh, this is great and all, but from what I've seen (working in a computer repair / recycling centre) Hitachi drives are the most unreliable. I'd rather wait for a WD or Samsung 4/5TB drive to come along.
... and many that I've seen only spin at 5400rpm...
The newer 5400rpm drives perform just as well or better than the 7200rpm drives. Due to the fact that the density of the data is increasing, they don't have to cover as much ground to fetch and transfer the data. So the increased density compensates for the slower rotation speed.
Great if true, but I'd be surprised if we see them in the UK within 12 months. 3TB only just landed in shops here and most of those drives are grossly overpriced and many that I've seen only spin at 5400rpm... Been needing a new storage drive for a while but I'm waiting until there's a drive that won't cost the earth and isn't so slow that backing up my files won't take days.
my newest drive only spins at 5400rpm yet it is quicker than the 7200rpm drives I have. Its not just down to spin speed - if access times and read/write times can be matched to the speed of a 7200rpm drive then I would always go with the 5400rpm drive