Laptop Hard Drives

Correction: The LG Electronics representative told Laptoping.com authors that the reported R400 notebook does not feature hybrid hard drive. Also, the image published in this article is not the R400’s.

“LG considers to introduce a Hybrid HDD notebook but we haven’t decided when to release it. In conclusion, we do not provide the R400 with a Hybrid HDD,” the representative said.

LG R400, the first notebook with hybrid hard drive, will be available starting in the end of March, according to its product page at Canadian OnlineElectronics store.

LG R400 incorporates Samsung’s 2.5-inch MH80 hybrid HDD with 120GB of storage capacity. There are MH80 models with built-in 128MB or 256MB of flash memory used for data buffering. When compared to standard laptop hard drives which usually have 2MB, 4MB, or 8MB of buffer cache, hybrid HDDs offer benefits such as improved boot up times and faster application loading, as well as decreased power consumption and better reliability.

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Samsung Electronics has announced it has begun shipments of its hybrid hard drives. Samsung’s MH80 series hybrid HDDs are offered in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities and with 128 or 256 megabytes of built-in flash memory, DigiTimes reports.

“Optimized to work in conjunction with Windows Vista capable notebook PCs, Samsung’s MH80 combines a hard disk drive with a cache comprised of Samsung’s OneNAND flash memory, and Microsoft’s ReadyDrive software, offering faster boot and resume times, increased battery life and greater reliability compared to traditional magnetic media technology,” the report says.

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Fujitsu today announced the development of the new MHW2 BJ series of world’s first 7,200rpm 2.5-inch hard disk drives with a serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s – also known as SATA2 – interface. Featuring the MHW2160BJ with “the world’s highest storage capacity of 160GB for a 2.5-inch HDD with 7,200rpm rotational speed”, the new series is targeted primarily at high-performance notebook computers.

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Samsung has introduced the world’s first 1.8-inch hard drive with a 60GB capacity on one HDD platter. It is designed for use in ultraportable computers and other consumer electronics products.

“Until now, two disks (platters) were required to reach a 60GB storage capacity in a 1.8-inch drive, which increased the height and size of the drive. Samsung’s N-series utilizes perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to offer 60GBs on a single disk. As a result, Samsung is the first to offer a 60GB solution in the slimmest available 5-millimeter form factor. This makes the drive ideal for use in small portable media centers and mobile music devices,” the company says.

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SanDisk introduced a 32GB 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD), based on NAND flash memory, as a drop-in replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive in laptop computers.

A notebook PC equipped with SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 35 seconds, compared with 55 seconds for a laptop with a standard HDD, the company claims. Also, it can achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds compared to hard disk’s 19 milliseconds.

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Toshiba today announced MK1011GAH, a 100GB 1.8-inch hard drive. The company claims it is the largest capacity yet achieved in 1.8-inch HDD form factor.

Toshiba MK1011GAH, employs perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology and an improved error correction code, according to the report. Alongside capacity improvement, Toshiba has also improved power consumption to 0.003W/GB, the press release says.

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Samsung today announced new M80 SATA, and M80 2.5-inch laptop hard drive series. Both series utilize Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology, an optional free-fall sensors and up to 160GB of storage capacity.

The M80 SATA Series features the 80GB HM080HI, the 120GB HM120II and 160GB HM160JI hard drives. The M80 (PATA) Series includes the 80GB HM080HC, the 120GB HM120IC and the 160GB HM160JC HDDs. The announced hard drives feature an 8MB of onboard data cache and 5,400rpm spindle speed.

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Seagate announced its forthcoming Momentus 5400 FDE.2 laptop-use hard drive with built-in full-disk encryption. Seagate says the Momentus 5400 FDE.2 2.5-inch 5,400rpm drive will transparently perform all cryptographic operations and access control within the drive itself, and that users will need only a password to self-authenticate for full-drive access.

According to Scott Shimomura, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, this new hardware-based technology will provide companies and individuals with full protection directly on their hard drives without having to worry about additional security software or the need for extensive setup or configuration.

“It will simply be a matter of setting the password to the drive, and that’s basically it,” said Shimomura on Monday, at the Storage Networking World conference in Orlando, Florida.

TDK announced a laptop hard drive replacement based on NAND Flash memory. The solid-state disc (SSD), with 32GB of storage space, connects to the host across a standard IDE connector, Reg Hardware reports.

The TDK’s SSD is about 80% of the size of a standard 2.5-inch laptop hard drive, and it consumes less power than a standard notebook HDD. The unit’s controller supports data transfer of up to 33.3MBps, the manufacturer published.

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Western Digital (WD) this week announced the WD1600BEVS, the 160 GB WD Scorpio 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive. The new laptop hard drive spins at 5400rpm, but, according to WD, it has low power consumption similar to 4200rpm notebook hard discs. The WD1600BEVS has 8MB of buffer size.

The new HDD employs perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to achieve high capacity in the small form factor, while WD’s WhisperDrive technology with SoftSeek algorithms make this “the quietest 2.5-inch hard drive”. Also, the drive can perform a minimum of 600,000 load/unload cycles without contamination – “up to twice the performance of its competitors”, the company claims.

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