Hitachi Launches Z-Series, Highest Capacity 7mm Hard Drive

Hitachi has launched a broad family of 2.5″ 7mm (z-height) hard drives designed to be used in thin and light notebooks, blade servers and home theater gear like DVRs. The Travelstar Z7K320 and Z5K320 families and the CinemaStar Z5K320 offer capacities up to 320GB on a single platter.

Hitachi has launched a broad family of 2.5″ 7mm (z-height) hard drives designed to be used in thin and light notebooks, blade servers and home theater gear like DVRs. The Travelstar Z7K320 and Z5K320 families and the CinemaStar Z5K320 offer capacities up to 320GB on a single platter.

Hitachi isn’t first to the 7mm hard drive party, Seagate offers the Momenus Thin, but it tops out at 250GB capacity and 5400RPM. The Hitachi Z-Series adds 70GB to the capacity count and the Travelstar Z7K320 brings 7200 RPM spindle speed to the table.

All three drives use a standard SATA 3Gb/s interface. On top of the 7200 RPM speed, the Z7K320 offers a 16MB cache. The drive uses 1.8 watts read/write power and .8W during idle and the noise front delivers 2.3 idle / 2.4 seek bels.

The Travelstar Z5K320 is a 5400 RPM drive with 8MB cache. It draws 1.6W read/write and 0.55W when idle and delivers acoustics at 1.9 idle / 2.0 seek bels.

The Hitachi CinemaStar Z5K320 is the first 7mm hard drive designed for the A/V space. The fifth generation CinemaStar offers acoustics at 1.9 idle / 2.0 seek bels and brings an improved protection scheme for power fluctuation and enhanced Thermal Fly-Height Control for improved error rates.

The Travelstar Z-series offer optional BDE for hard drive level data security. The drives support Pre-Boot Authentication, and offer better administrative controls for data protection and an easier drive re-deployment process. They are also offered in Enhanced Availability (EA) models in capacities of 250GB and 320GB, which are designed and fine-tuned for applications needing “always-on” protection in 24×7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems.

Availability

The Z-Series of drives is largely designed for OEMs and system integrators, though a consumer kit may be available in the future. The Travelstar Z5K320 family will be available in volume in July, the Travelstar Z7K320 and the CinemaStar Z5K320 drive families will ship in August. As this is an OEM release, pricing was not announced, but in a briefing Hitachi indicated pricing for these 7mm single platter drives should be in line with current 9.5mm, 2-platter designs.

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Update – Hitachi TravelStar Z5K320 Review Posted