Hitachi launches 250 GB 2.5" hard drive

San Jose (CA) - Hitachi today announced a 250 GB hard drive for notebooks.

The new 2.5" Travelstar drive comes in two flavors - one for consumers (model 5K250) and on for enterprise applications (E5K250), which provides enhanced availability, according to the manufacturer. Compared to the recently announced 200 GB 7K200, the 250 GB version’s platters spin with 5400 rpm instead of 7200 rpm - which results in a slightly reduced power consumption (1.8 watts during read/write processes.)

In comparison with its direct predecessor, the 5K160 (160 GB), the new drive offers a 56% increase in capacity as well as 23% more shock tolerance (400G during operation) and 8% more performance, Hitachi said. 250 GB are enough to store about 250 hours of standard definition video, 89 full movies, or more than 60,000 MP3 music tracks. The areal storage density of the two-platter is 205 Gb/inch2.

A new optional feature in the Travelstar series is "Bulk Data Encryption", which enables data to be scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. A similar technology has been offered for some time by Seagate in the Momentus FDE series.

Hitachi is shipping the 5K250 now for a suggested retail price of $250.