Ian Grayson08 April 2008, 3:52 PM
Flash drives might be getting all the attention lately, but that’s hasn’t stopped Fujitsu cranking up the specs on its latest offering: a 320GB beast spinning at 7200RPM.
Fujitsu has upped the ante in the highly competitive storage market by unveiling its new MHZ2 BJ series 2.5-inch hard drive -- the first commercially available hard drive running at desktop speeds with a 320GB capacity.
Designed specifically for high-end notebook PCs, the drive spins at 7200 RPM, putting it well ahead of most drives that can manage speeds of just 5400RPM. Fujitsu itself already offers some 2.5-inch drives that spin at 7,200rpm, but the largest can only manage to swallow 120GB of data.
Fujitsu says it has been able to achieve this speed in the MHZ2 BJ without upping power demands. The drive use just 2.3 watts of electricity for both read and write functions, making it one of the most efficient on the market.
If all that’s not enough to impress, the company has also incorporated the new Serial ATA 3.0 Gbps interface which provides top performance for cached read operations (though in reality, won't provide any performance benefit over the SATA-1 standard for magnetic read/write operations.)
Fujitsu says it will start shipping the devices in June this year. As yet there is no word on prices or which notebook manufacturers are likely to include it in their offerings.
According to research company Gartner, global shipments of 2.5-inch 7200RPM SATA hard drives grew by more than 90 per cent last year while the overall market for 2.5-inch drives increased by 60 per cent.
Demand is being driven by rapid growth in the high-end notebook market. With users keen to make the most of rich multimedia and gaming applications on their portable devices, manufacturers are keen to improve performance while keeping a lid on power consumption.
When they ship, the new MHZ2 BJ drives will be available in a range of capacities from 80GB to 320GB.