Hitachi Takes On SSDs With Magnetic Travelstar

May 12, 2008: In a bid to steal some of the excitement directed at the emerging solid state disk (SSD) market, Hitachi has released its latest 7,200 RPM Travelstar hard drive, claiming that it offers many advantages over SSDs when cost and capacity is taken into account.

The company says its fourth-generation 7K320 notebook hard drive delivers 60 percent higher capacity than its predecessor, while improving application performance by 12 percent and power consumption by 22 percent.

It also boasts that the drive is exceptionally quiet and comes with Bulk Data Encryption for increased data security, while on a performance level the 7,200 RPM speeds put the drive on par with typical desktops.

The company is pitching the drive at notebooks, compact desktops, gaming systems, blade servers and video surveillance systems, and due to this wide-area of use it has also included shock protection of 400Gs and power consumption on par with average 5,400 RPM drives.

“As operating systems have grown more complex, users have struggled with an overall decrease in system performance,” says Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

“Solid state drives (SSD) have yet to deliver an overall increase in speed, and certainly not at an affordable price. The 7,200 RPM speed of the Travelstar 7K320 provides an improved overall experience, at the capacities users want and at a far lower cost than SSD.”

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