Dan Warne14 July 2006, 3:13 PM
Hitachi has released a 5400RPM 2.5 notebook drive that uses perpendicular technology to hit 160GB, and SATA to connect with the latest notebooks. But there are still rumblings of discontent in the tech community about how slowly hard-drive makers are beefing up notebook drive capacity compared to the whopping desktop drives available now.
Hitachi Global Storage has beaten other hard drive makers in the race to ship a 5400RPM 160GB notebook drive that uses serial ATA. It is dubbed Hitachi Travelstar 5K160.
It's a positive development for owners of the latest laptops from Dell, Apple and other manufacturers, which use serial ATA as their hard drive interface rather than the deprecated PATA standard.
Hitachi GST Australia told APC it will be selling the Travelstar 5K160 here but can't yet announce a price or release date.
If you're keen to buy one, MacSales.com has the drives on sale for $US279 ($370) and can ship to Australia via FedEx International Priority for $US24.75 ($32.82).
Slow progress on notebook hard drive capacitiesÂÂ
Because the vast majority of notebooks have had PATA connectors until now, hard drive makers have been slow to introduce high capacity models with a SATA connector, fearing low demand.
Seagate already ships a 160GB 2.5" drive based on perpendicular storage technology, but has only made it available with a parallel ATA connector so far, so it can't be used with the latest laptops.
However, aside from the SATA issue, laptop users are starting to show frustration generally that hard drive makers have been slow to boost notebook hard drive capacities, despite making great leaps in desktop hard drive capacities (including a 750GB desktop drive from Seagate).
The lack of progress seems to fly in the face of the trend towards people using a notebook as their primary home, work and entertainment PC, especially considering the greater storage need generated by operating system virtualisation, high resolution digital cameras and digital video.
Sculley, a contributor to Jason O'Grady's PowerPage, writes of his frustration at slow progress on notebook hard drive capacities: "Perpendicular drives have given a needed boost to portable HDD capacity, but it just does not strike me as being enough. As time passes, my storage needs seem to be quickly outstripping what the industry is currently providing us with. Gotta go...my hard disk is almost full." [read the full post]
Hitachi claims more reliable perpendicular technology
Hitachi's announcement for the drive casts FUD directly at the world's largest hard drive maker, Seagate, which has been making loud noises about its leadership in perpendicular storage technology.
Perpendicular storage is a major shift in hard drive technology and has required hard drive makers to reinvent the internal mechanisms of their drives. Rather than laying magnetic particles along the drive's tracks longways, a perpendicular mechanism achieves dramatically greater data density by standing them on their head.
Hitachi says the technology is prone to media corrosion, head instability and head/disk interference. And of course, it says its drives are the best in all these factors.
To prove it, it says it ditched its first generation perpendicular technology, after running drives in live 'in the field' tests since December 2004.
After a redesign of the drive head, it built 20,000 drives and tested 5,000 of them non-stop to determine failure results. It says the new drives were more reliable than its previous generation using the tried and tested longitudinal recording technology.
On an entirely unrelated note...
If you think all hard drive marketing is boring, you obviously haven't seen Hitachi's legendary hard drive bling video. Do yourself a favour and watch it now.
The company has also released a new video which amazingly manages to explain the superparamagnetic effect in song.
And then there's Mikey...
