Hitachi Ships Travelstar 5K250 Quarter-Terabyte Laptop Hard Drive

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Hitachi announces volume shipment of the industry's highest-performing and lowest power-consuming laptop hard disk drive at a quarter terabyte of capacity. The Travelstar 5K250 hard drive combines the fastest application performance in PCMark testing with the best power-efficiency of any 250 gigabyte 5400 RPM drive in its class. The newest 5400 RPM 2.5-inch hard drive from Hitachi – developed for notebook PCs, external storage devices, gaming consoles and other mobile devices – also features a host of category-leading features including 400G shock protection, quiet acoustics and optional Bulk Data Encryption for hard-drive level data security.

The Travelstar 5K250 hard drive offers 56 percent more capacity, a 23 percent shock improvement and an 8 percent overall application performance boost over its predecessor, the Travelstar 5K160 hard drive. According to the PCMark05 Benchmark, the Travelstar 5K250 hard drive offers 10 to 25 percent faster application performance than competing 5400 RPM drives. The 5K250 uses perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which builds upon the highly-successful debut of the Travelstar 5K160 hard drives.

Hitachi will also offer an enhanced-availability version, the E5K250, which is designed for applications needing around-the-clock access in lower transaction environments, such as blade servers, network routers, point-of-sale terminals and video surveillance systems.

The Travelstar 5K250 hard drive offers, gigabyte for gigabyte, the best combination of leadership characteristics in a 5400 RPM 2.5-inch hard drive:
- 250 GB of storage translates to 250 hours of video, 89 feature length movies, 125 games or 64, 500 four-minute songs;
- 10-25 percent faster application performance than competitive 5400 RPM, featuring maximum sustained data rate of 665 megabits per second;
- 1.8W read/write power and 0.55W low power idle means longer battery life for more "unplugged" notebook time;
- 400 G operating shock (1000 G non-operating shock) gives your data the best protection against bumps and rough handling.

Bulk Data Encryption from Hitachi is a hard-drive level data security mechanism that essentially puts users' data under lock and key for virtually impenetrable protection. It is offered as an option on the Travelstar 5K250 hard drive as well as the recently announced, Travelstar 7K200 hard drive, which is the 7200 RPM, high performance model of the product line.

Previously, data on a hard drive could be protected either through software-based encryption or a system-level password. However, hard-drive level encryption provides a higher level of benefit than both these options by offering better performance than software-based encryption and a higher level of security than system password protection.

In Bulk Data Encryption, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. Thus, data encryption at the hard-drive level is generally considered a more sophisticated approach to securing users' data.

Another benefit to hard-drive level security is the data-erasing process. Today, hard drives must either be physically destroyed or the existing data must be written over and over before it can be safely discarded without fear of data piracy or identity theft. Bulk Data Encryption makes data-erasing unnecessary. By simply deleting the encryption key, the data on the hard drive is rendered unreadable and, thus, safe from prying eyes.

With the rise in notebook theft and the relative ease in which software-based password security can be compromised, Hitachi's Bulk Data Encryption is an essential component for on-the-go notebook users.

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