San Jose (CA) - Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is announcing volume shipments of its 200 GB, 7200 RPM Travelstar drive. The 2.5" drives sport a SATA interface and have a 4.2 ms average latency according to Hitachi. The drives also have an optional data encryption technology which can scramble the information on the entire drive.

Hitachi says Dell and Alienware will be the first vendors to offer the new drive. Power users can also order a Dell XPS M2010 and Aurora Alienware m9700 laptops with dual drives for a total of 400 GB of storage - not bad for a laptop. Using "Bulk Data Encyption4", users can scramble drive contents with an encryption key. Secure "erasure" can be quickly accomplished by deleting or forgetting the key. Hitachi says the encryption does not reduce the storage capacity.

The Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 will retail for around $250.