Z5K500
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HGST launches new CinemaStar drives for media PCs and set top boxes
What's 2.5-inches wide, 7mm tall and silent as a whisper? Well, hopefully it's HGST's new CinemaStar hard drives. We know for certain that these platters of polarized bits will fit in your standard 2.5-inch drive bay, we'll just have to take this Western Digital subsidiary at its word (for now) on the silent bit. Three new families of disks just hit the market, the Z7K500, Z5K500 and budget-friendly C5K1000. The first two options are 7mm high, allowing them to slide nicely into small form factor PCs, DVRs and even laptops. Both top out at 500GB, but the Z7K ekes out better performance by whipping its platters around at 7,200 RPM, while the Z5Ks save energy and noise by ratcheting back to 5,400 RPM. The C5K comes in a slightly bulkier 9.5mm height, but this 5,400 RPM drive does reach the lofty storage size of 1TB. For now the drives are available in limited quantities to OEMs, but hopefully that will change soon enough. Check out the PR after the break for more details.
Hitachi's 7mm-thick hard drives grow to 500GB, keep slimline profile
If you can't beat SSDs (and you can't, we've checked), you might as well try and dress like them by squeezing into the unreasonably low profile of just 7mm. Such must be the reasoning behind Hitachi's svelte 7mm-thick HDD series, which today gets augmented with a new top-of-the-line drive boasting 500GB of storage room. This single-platter archivist measure 2.5 inches diagonally, but as its Z5K500 product name suggests, it only spins at the tame rate of 5400RPM. The less generously proportioned Z7K320 offers 7200RPM if you're after more oomph, but it's most likely that your first real contact with either of these drives will be when you see them built into whatever larger device you're buying. Like, say, an ultrathin netbook or a PMP that's eager to swallow your music collection whole.
