- Tuesday, 17 November 2009
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Let's not cut off our nose to spite our interface - Arron Rouse
Laptop HDs get speed bump
LAPTOP HARD DRIVES have been playing catch up with their desktop cousins for some time but an announcement from Hitachi today sees the gap narrowing between the 3.5 inch drives normally found in big boxen and the diminutive 2.5 incher in your laptop.
The Japanese electronics giant's new Travelstar 7K range has platters which spin at a nippy 7,200 rpm whereas most current 2.5 inch drives wheeze away at 5,400 rpm. And at a maximum of 320GB, the capacity is pretty impressive too.
Hitachi reckons the drives improve application performance by 12 per cent whilst reducing power consumption by 22 per cent and still remain quiet enough to make watching movies on your lappy a pleasurable experience.
Hitachi is staying tight-lipped about which box builders will be using the new drives in production models, but you should be able to get hold of a retail version in the next week or so for around £110.
Here are some more numbers for you to drool over. µ
Travelstar 7K320
320/250/160/120/80GB
9.5mm in height
7,200 RPM
252 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
2/2/1/1/1 glass disks
4/4/2/2/1 TMR recording head(s)
1000G/1ms non-operating shock
400G/2ms operating shock
4.2ms average latency
12ms average read time
1.0W active idle
0.8W low-power idle
Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 1.5Gb/s encrypted
115/110 grams in weight
2.5Bels typical idle acoustics
2.8Bels typical operational acoustics
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Hitachi 7200RPM drives are available for years...
Not at a 320GB capacity. And I know it is a different market, but previous 7.2k HDD have proved to be noisy, hot and power hungry. This one is supposed to be less of those.
Yes been using 7200rpm drives in my laptops for ages. Its the first thing I do when I buy a new one. Rip out the 5400rpm 'thing' and put in a nice fresh 7200rpm Hitachi.

Forget the 4Gb of ram!
I sencond the opinion that Hitachi has 7200 rpm 2.5" drives for years. However there are other manufacturers like Seagate and Fujitsu producing similar drives.
NewEgg lists 21 7200 rpm 2.5" drives, which is 23% of notebook drives carried by them.
Granted, 320 is possibly highest capacity for this kind of drive to date.
Catalin is right. I'm holding in my paw a Hitachi Travelstar 60 GB 7200 RPM ATA 2.5" drive. Birth date was November 2003. It is unfortunately no longer in service due to an ever increasing count of bad sectors. 
(Model:HTS726060M9AT00)
The real news here is the 320GB capacity. Not the 7K rotational velocity.

Both my laptops have Travelstar 7K200s. Previously they had 7K100s. Before that they had 7K60s.

It is unfortunate that Hitachi did not introduce a better product here.

a 400-500GB 7Krpm HD with 32-64MB of cache is the kind of upgrade I was hoping for to keep the developing SSD market at bay.

Hey jason, according to the datasheet, the travelstar 7k320 has a Higher Sustained Media Transfer rate (max) of;; 1136Mb/second
compared to Hitachi's own 1,000GB drive (deskstar 7k1000) with a Sustained Media Transfer rate (max) of only;; 1070Mb/second!

According to the datasheets, it should have a better STR than the 7k1000! WooT!

Its going to compete well with the high capacity desktop drives.
Previous comment by me was for 'Ron', not 'Jason'.