Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 - World’s First 500GB 2.5″ Hard Drive

Hitachi GST today introduced the Travelstar 5K500 laptop hard drive featuring 500GB of storage space, which is the world’s highest capacity for a 2.5-inch HDD.

“The half-terabyte (500GB) Travelstar 5K500 is poised to usher in a new era of “slim” desktops, full-featured notebooks, gaming consoles and other advanced applications for consumers on-the-go,” the company’s press release says.

The Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 drives feature a 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) interface, a 5,400rpm rotational speed, and an optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security. (Update: Its height is 12.5mm.)

This HDD will be also available in 400GB capacity. Additionally, Hitachi prepares an enhanced-availability version, called the Travelstar E5K500, also in both 400GB and 500GB capacities. The E5K500 is designed for applications requiring 24×7 operation in lower transaction environments, such as blade servers and network routers.

The Travelstar 5K500 will be available worldwide in February, while the Travelstar E5K500 will be available by the end of the second quarter, 2008.

Hitachi said Asustek has integrated dual 5K500 hard drives into its new ASUS M50 and M70 notebook PCs, providing 1TB of storage capacity.

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[…] Asustek’s press release says the M50 notebook will be also available with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 1GB graphics (M50Sa) and HD3470 with 256MB of video memory (M50Sr). According to the earlier report, some models will include up to one terabyte of hard drive space, provided by two Travelstar 5K500 500GB HDDs. In addition, the M50 will feature a Blu-ray optical drive and a built-in optional analog/digital TV tuner. […]

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