Hitachi's TravelStar 5K250 laptop drive hits 250GB

And Hitachi makes three. Crashing Samsung's and Fujitsu's 9-mm thin, 250GB laptop disk party is Hitachi's new TravelStar 5K250. Spinning at 5,400rpm, it brings along your choice of SATA 3Gbps and 1.5Gbps interfaces, an 11-ms mean seek time, 8MB data buffer, 24dB rattle when idle (26dB operational), and 1.8W average power draw during read/write cycles. Pretty consistent with the others until you factor in Hitachi's optional Bulk Data Encryption to safeguard data from loss or criminal harvesting. Shipping in volume today for an undisclosed price.

[Via Impress]

[Paul in Maryland @ Jun 5th 2007 8:53AM]

It was August 2006 when Hitachi introduced the TravelStar 5K160; that same month, I bought one for $175 shipped and installed it in my college-bound daughter's MacBook. I knew that perpendicular technology had breathed new life into Moore's Law, but I figured that that was a one-time gain. Who imagined that Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Samsung would raising perpendicular capacity by more than 50 percent in less than a year? C'mon, Seagate, it's your turn...

[Jon @ Jun 5th 2007 11:51AM]

I didn't know Moore's Law could be applied to Harddrive capacity?

Anyway 250GB is a nice boost for notebooks, but I would sacrifice space for their 7K200 harddrives.

[thomas_h @ Jun 5th 2007 10:02AM]

I got me a 250GB 5400rpm laptop drive a few days ago for my shiny new macbook. It's gonna be sweet having so much room for music, movies and bootcamp.

[Tim Buckingham @ Jun 5th 2007 10:18AM]

It actually makes 4. Western Digital actually has theirs on the market as well (and available at some retailers).

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=314

[Igor @ Jun 5th 2007 12:01PM]

Doesn't really matter, none of these drives are available yet. The WD one is listed at one online store for 300, and its out of stock, so you can't buy any of the 250 gb notebook sata drives yet at all. I wonder when they will actually be released.

[thomas_h @ Jun 5th 2007 1:19PM]

See my comment 3 comments above yours. I got my samsung 250GB 5400rpm sata 2.5" a few days ago. Just waiting for my Macbook.

[KC @ Jun 5th 2007 1:14PM]

Now these would make for a nice PS3 internal drive.

[shimman @ Jun 5th 2007 1:46PM]

hmmm....not sure how hitachi crashed samsung; i already using samsung 250gb 2.5" drive;

newegg.com also sells it for 240usd unless this is something far differenet from hitachi drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152094

[scott @ Oct 24th 2007 6:09PM]

Does anyone know if there are compatibility issues with this in a MacBook Pro 2.16 (May 2006)? I've heard it is not stable and will crash a lot.