Hitachi's New Endurastar J4K50 and N4K50 Automotive Hard Drives

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Hitachi intros two new automotive hard drives that are tough enough to take on the harshest roads - even those less traveled. The Endurastar J4K50 and N4K50 are Hitachi's fourth-gen hard drives geared for automotive applications, such as navigation, digital entertainment (music/books/video), telematics and truly mobile computing. Featuring a wider temperature range and an industry-leading altitude range, the new Endurastar drives also incorporate leadership shock-absorption technologies to take on pot holes and other surface vibrations as far as a car can drive. The Hitachi J4K50 and N4K50 feature the highest storage capacity in an automotive-class hard drive with a top capacity of 50 gigabytes.

The Hitachi Endurastar J4K50 offers an unsurpassed operating temperature range of -30 to +85 degrees Celsius (-22 to +185 degrees Fahrenheit), while the N4K50 sports a slightly lower range at -16 to +70 degrees Celsius (3 to 158 degrees Fahrenheit). This means the Hitachi Endurastar drives can operate at below freezing and near boiling temperatures. In terms of the road, the Hitachi J4K50 would be able to travel from Antarctica, where the winter mean temperature is -30 degrees Celsius, to the Sahara Desert, where the hottest soil temperature could reach 80 degrees Celsius. The Endurastar products employ a technology called Thermal Fly-height Control to keep the read/write head at an appropriate distance from the surface of the disk as needed, which can be affected by extreme temperature variances.

Also, an altitude range of -300 to 5.000 meters allows the Hitachi J4K50 to successfully store and retrieve data from the lowest point on earth, near the Dead Sea (-394 m), to the highest paved road in the world in the Andes Mountains (4.818 m). The Hitachi N4K50 can travel to a slightly lower altitude with an upper range of 3.000 meters. To traverse hills, mountains and other bumpy terrain, Hitachi employs the following technologies to make the Endurastar products more rugged. The drives can survive as much as 3.0 G operating vibration and up to an 800 G drop shock:
- Fluid Dynamic Bearing motors are tuned to help the Endurastar start up at low temperatures and achieve high temperature operating endurance;
- Developed specifically for the Endurastar, high-capacity breather filters inside the drive improve absorption capability 10 times over standard filters to protect from excessive humidity and organic pollutants;
- Shock sensors monitor environmental disturbances to maintain data integrity during on-the-go write operations;
- Large 8-megabyte segmented cache buffers sufficient data to bridge even the most severe driving experiences.

Both the J4K50 and the N4K50 will be available in the first quarter of 2007.

Technical Specifications:
- Endurastar J4K50/N4K50
- 50/40/30 GB
- 9.5 mm in height
- 97 grams maximum weight
- 4260 RPM
- 86.1 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
- 2/2/2 recording heads
- 1/1/1 platter
- 250 G (2ms) operating shock
- 800 G (1ms) non-operating shock
- 388 Mb/s max. media transfer rate
- 13 ms seek time
- 7.04 ms average latency
- 100 Ultra DMA mode-5
- 8 MB data buffer
- 1.8 w active idle
- 0.8 w low power idle
- 2.4 Bels typical idle acoustics
- -30 to +85 degrees C operating temperature (J4K50)
- -16 to +70 degrees C operating temperature (N4K50)
- -300 to 5.000 meters operating altitude range (J4K50)
- -300 to 3.000 meters operating altitude range (N4K50).

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