HGST Launches 1.5TB Hard Drive For Notebooks
HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, announced on Tuesday what it claims is the highest storage density of any hard drive and highest capacity HDD for the mainstream mobile market, the Travelstar 5K1500.
The Travelstar 5K1500 is purportedly the industry’s first 9.5mm to offer 1.5TB of storage capacity and offers high shock protection and low power performance.
Most of today’s 2.5″ notebook hard drives top out at an even terabyte. You can find higher-capacity offerings, but those conform to 12.5- and 15-mm versions of the 2.5″ form factor, which are meant for external enclosures and are too fat to fit in most notebooks.
The drive has an areal density of 694Gbit/in2, spins at 5,400 RPM, has an idle power draw of 0.5W (1.8W when active), and a dual-stage actuator for more precise track head-track positioning. The 5K1500 family has an operating shock number of 400G and non-operating shock of 1000G for bumps and rough handling resistance.
“Contrary to popular belief, the mobile hard drive market is not being replaced by SSDs,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST.
“We continue to invest in and serve both the traditional 9.5 mm and 7 mm thin and light HDD mobile markets as they offer the best cost-per-GB, performance and proven product reliability for high-capacity, mainstream, Ultrabook and A/V content creation notebook markets.”
The Travelstar 5K1500 does have some built-in cache, but it’s a more traditional DRAM chip that weighs in at 32MB. That cache size is actually pretty generous for a notebook drive; most have only 16MB of onboard memory.
Pricing and international availability has not been announced yet.
[MaximumPC]
