RSSHitachi debuts 500GB laptop drives, but you can't buy them
By Nate Mook | Published January 3, 2008, 2:23 PM
If 320GB isn't enough storage for your mobile computing needs, Hitachi has a new option that offers a whopping 500GB of space, but with one caveat: it's bigger than standard laptop hard drives.
Hard disk manufacturers have been working hard to develop new technologies to pack ever more data into the smaller hard drives used in notebooks. While standard desktop drives are hitting the long-awaited 1 terabyte milestone, more consumers are opting for laptops instead, demanding similar storage capacities.
Perpendicular recording has made it possible to fit more data onto a single drive platter, and portable hard drives recently reached 320GB in size. But to beat that mark, Hitachi's new 5K500 doesn't rely on new technology; instead, it simply adds an extra platter. As a result, the 500GB drive is also larger in physical size.
Rather than being 9.5mm thick, Hitachi's drive is 12.5mm, which limits its use in current laptop form factors. That means it won't be sold to consumers, and likely will only appear in notebooks designed specifically to accommodate the larger drive.
Asus will implement two of the drives in each of its M50 and M70 models in order to deliver 1 terabyte of storage in its laptops. Hitachi says OEMs can purchase the 500GB drives for around $400 USD each when they go on sale in February.
Nonetheless, Hitachi will still hold the bragging rights for the largest mobile hard drive over competitors Seagate and Western Digital. Thankfully for consumers, those companies will likely work overtime to develop new ways to fit more data onto their drives without compromising physical size.
Who si oing to use a 500 GB laptop... it has to fit your lap... i have a 500 GB don´t use it at all... my 100 GB from my computer can handle everything... so i just use to back up few pics or some videos and songs...
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|BAM! An extra platter and its revolutionary!
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|meh, ...
(this story, more than a spell check, it needed a grammar check ....
i needed to get my translator to make some sense out of half the posts)
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|All they did was add an extra platter. What an achievement.
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|i have a 1 TB external, and am never away from home long enough to need/use more than my internal notebook drive can handle. i would much rather see a smaller notebook drive (say, 200 GB or so) that reaches the 10,000 RPM milestone...THAT would be impressive.
and maybe im alone on this one too, but i wish more resources were spent on solid-state drive development...the day i see a reasonably priced 128 GB SSD is the last day ill use traditional hard drives.
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|I don't know if 10k RPM is actually a good thing for a laptop. For me, laptop need to be cool, light, and long battery life. 10k definitely increase the heat and kill the battery life.
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|There will never be a 10,000 RPM hard disk for laptops considering how much heat these types of hard drives generate. The problem with solid state hard drives is that flash memory wears out a lot faster than current mechanical hard drives resulting in data loss. The only good technology that might get used in solid state hard drives eventually is the upcoming magnetic RAM.
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|Battery backed RAM drives.
The technology has been around since the 80s.
Would be great for drives that don't need to be large, but do need to be fast.
I want this:
http://www.anandtech.com...doc.aspx?i=2431&p=5
in IDE, SATA, and serial SCSI formats, that can hold up to 512GB of memory per "disk". :-D
Flush that to an array of inexpensive disks in your server farm, or "autosync" to a physical disk in a docking station if necessary.
Being battery backed, it's prone to data loss but so is RAID (since it's battery backed).
A RAID 50 of RAM would be AWESOME, then everything else is a bottleneck heh.
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|I think though too that one of the reason's they aren't acheiving that so quickly is because it would shorten the battery life of your laptop too.
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|Smarterthanyou,
The heat issue with notebooks now seems to be more that what is generated by GFX card than the HD, simply an observation from someone who has never owned a desktop.
And, I am most interested in your comment SSD's, could you post a link confirming this please? Reason being, this one I'm typing on has 2X64gb SSD's, it is leased ergo not overly concerned, just curious.
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|It's old hat. Most SSD nowadays can last 5 years under normal use. Makes the issue kind of moot except in cases where data is critical (in which case you'd be using 15K standard drives and a backup solution....right?).
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|Yum, but.... Needs to be faster than SATA and non-volatile. :p
But hey, for $50....
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|think access times, IE: transactional DBs etc. :-D
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|Why would I do that? I just want HL2:E2 to load in less than 1 second. :p
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|I don't have a link regarding magnetic RAM. I read this information in previous issues of PC Magazine and CPU Magazine.
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|You don't lose data on SSDs. If a sector is worn too badly on an attempted write, it writes to another location determined by the wear-leveling algorithms, and that sector is marked unusable. You won't likely burn out any current drive in its practical lifetime. A 32GB SSD writing constantly at 100MB/sec will not likely mark its first worn sector until more than a year later. Since most notebook and desktop drives are active 10% of the time or less, you're looking at 10 years before the first sector is marked worn. This is not a major concern, as by this time, one will likely be on a different system.
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|It's just the lamest of sh*ts that companies do to say they are ahead. Adding another platter! If it isn't the regular size just like every other notebook HDD... it's utter sh*t!
Yeh, someone will always bite.
(Be careful with the title "HIATCHI debuts...")
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|"Asus will implement two of the drives in each of its M50 and M70 models in order to deliver 1 gigabyte of storage in its laptops."
1 terabyte perhaps?
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|beat me to the punchline!
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|I think you need glasses...
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|They likely edited it after the comment was written.
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|Be Polite!!!
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