Mobile hard disk drive

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced that it is shipping its Travelstar 7K500, a 500 GB, 2.5″, 3 Gbps SATA drive designed for notebooks, gaming systems and professional external storage solutions. Combining performance, ruggedness and capacity, Travelstar 7K500 is suitable for multitasking, gaming and other graphic-intensive applications.

The Travelstar 7K500 is the fastest hard drive in its class it is claimed and delivers up to 56% higher capacity and 16% better application performance than its predecessor. It also provides best-of-breed operating shock and outstanding power management for sturdy, unplugged notebook performance.

Due to their value and portability, notebooks and external storage devices are highly susceptible to theft. If those devices fall in the wrong hands, sensitive data stored on the drive could become compromised. To help combat this issue, Hitachi GST has provided hardware-based Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) as an option on its Travelstar mobile hard drives for four generations. Travelstar 7K500 is one of the first mobile drives to be compliant with the Trusted Computing Group’s Opal storage security specification, a new open standard designed to strengthen data protection and safeguard notebooks in the event of system loss or theft.

When the Hitachi BDE option is enabled, the hard drive will encrypt all data that comes from the system as it is written to the media. When read back, the drive decrypts the data so that it can be understood by the system. Since the hard drive is doing the encryption work, there is no impact on system performance. A Hitachi hard drive with BDE is always automatically encrypting data, so the system user never has to worry about whether or not the data is being protected. For commercial or corporate IT managers with a large pool of systems, BDE also speeds up and simplifies the drive redeployment process. By deleting the encryption key, the data is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming data-overwrite.

The Travelstar 7K500 has been designed for energy efficiency with low power consumption at 0.69 W idle power and 1.8 W during read/write operations, which contributes to longer battery life in notebooks and other mobile applications.