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Hitachi Helps Asus Launch Terabyte Laptop

<a href="/david_murphy">David Murphy<br /></a> — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:19:53 -0600

Hitachi is rolling out a new line of notebook hard drives, and it’s certainly a doozy! Dubbed the Travelstar 5K500, the 5,400 RPM, 500GB hard drive will finally place laptops into the storage feast long since enjoyed by their desktop counterparts. But there’s a small catch – to achieve such an improvement, Hitachi merely slapped an extra platter onto its standard, two-disc design. This kicks the height of the drive itself up from 9.5mm to 12.5mm, although company officials promise that modern notebooks should easily be able to handle this larger form factor.

At the very least, Asus has taken the plunge. The company intends to use 5K500 drives in its new line of M50 and M70 laptops, the latter featuring up to a terabyte of storage space. Yes, that’s right. A terabyte. It will be the first laptop to hit this mark, undoubtedly featuring two 5K500s in a RAID-style configuration.

But with new technological advancements come new questions – are these drives reliable? Loud? Warm? We took a chat with Hitachi’s Director of Marketing and Strategy, Larry Swezey, to get the dirt on these devilishly large drives. We'll have pictures of the drives soon enough, but until then, here’s what he told us.

Extra Features:

“We will have encryption as an optional feature for this. This is very much compatible with all of the other drivers we’ve launched that have encryption.”

Energy-savings:

“Despite this being 3 discs, we’ve been able to do some nice changes to the motor and some of the electronic circuitry that drives the motor.”

The 5K500 will leech as much power as one of Hitachi’s two-disc 250GB drives, although the 5K500 isn’t going for the famed “energy-conscious” title. “We’re focused on the fact that it gives you the higher capacity, but there’s no penalty in terms of power increase,” Swezey added.

Data Safety:

“Vibration is a big problem, and we’ve had to do a lot to address that.”

Hitachi’s slapping its Rotational Vibration Safeguard technology into the 5K500. Whenever vibration from the speakers begins to adversely affect the drive heads, the drive itself will respond with a countering force. It’s the “every action is equal and opposite” school of drive safety, and in this case, should help protect your data from your rocking out.

7200 RPM?

“It’s something we’re thinking about for the next generation. In terms of the 5400, it’s a commonly accepted spin speed in the world of notebooks, so again, being mindful of the energy concerns and the concerns about batteries, we wanted to go out first with a 5400 to make sure we had the market acceptance.”

Areal Density!

“Forty percent capacity growth per year is probably a reasonable number. There’s not going to be this next generation super killer tech that we can ride for the long period of time we rode like MR/GMR for example. We have perpendicular magnetic recording, but that won’t give us the tremendous growth we saw.

If you’re really driving the areal density to get to the higher capacity points, there’s always a tradeoff of your manufacturing yields, time to market, and the quality of the product you’re producing.”

A Single Notebook Terabyte Drive?

“There’s more technology available -- I wouldn’t dare to say which ones we’re going to use, but there’s been a lot of discussion in terms of pattern media and thermally assisted recording. There are other technological tricks that we and the HD industry have available to us to be able to increase capacity.”

Swezey estimates that we’ll see a single, terabyte, notebook drive within three to four years.

Fingers-On: Hitachi's 7K1000 Terabyte Hard Drive

David Murphy — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:00:00 -0500

And here I thought the best thing about Friday was going to be the planned Burritos 'n Biscuits run to our local Taco Bell/KFC hybrid. No, Hitachi's new terabyte hard drive takes the cake (or the empanada) for today. Quite literally the second the box hit my desk, I was already there with the scissors, ready to rush this little guy into the labs for benchmarking.

Having survived the brief experience, the Deskstar 7K1000 emerged from our labs as a strong competitor -- speed-wise -- against all the other similarly configured drives we've tested. Pound-for-pound, the 7K1000 pulls in ever-so-slightly better a random access time than the next-closest hard drive in size, Seagate's 750GB Barracuda. Obviously, Western Digital's Raptor drive spanks the Deskstar like a... well... insert-your-favorite-spanking-related-metaphor-here. Still, that's almost comparing apples to oranges, considering the terabyte drive is over four times larger than the paltry 150GB Raptor. Against the 500GB drives we've tested, the Deskstar's random access speed is comparable to its lesser, 500GB model, and still faster than Samsung's SpinPoint T166 and Western Digital's trusty Caviar SE16.

Jumping over to average read speeds, the five-platter 7K1000 rocks out a blazingly speedy 72.7 MB/s. Minus Western Digital's Raptor drive, that's the fastest of the most recent drives we've tested. And yes, that again includes the 750GB Seagate. And it's quite faster than Hitachi's 500GB Deskstar, which clocked in a mere 64.2 MB/s during our labs tests.

All things considered -- including the price, $400! -- Hitchai's 7K1000 rocks. Absolutely rocks. It's speeds are certainly comparable, and in most cases better than, the current batch of similarly sized market leaders. And that's without even considering the big picture; you're getting a terabyte of storage. A terabyte. 1,000 gigabytes. And it's only $400? Seagate's 750GB Barracuda has an MSRP of $500. 'says it all, if you ask me!

Brief Stats!

Interface: SATA 3.0 Gb/s

Disks/heads: 5/10

Data buffer: 32MB

Rotational Speed: 7,200 RPM

Pioneer BD-R 101A Blu-ray Drive

Josh Norem — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 11:00:13 -0500

Blu-ray has finally arrived, and like a lot of first-gen products, it’s big on price, but not so big on performance. Sure, we used it in the Dream Machine last month, and we stand by that decision. The Dream Machine is all about the bleeding-edge—it boasted a beta BIOS, a beta chipset, and a Blu-ray drive too, damn it, despite despite the fact that Blu-ray movies and blank media are incredibly scarce.

Now that we’re back in the real world, however, it’s time for a sober assessment of Blu-ray technology. Does it work? Yes. Can it really burn 25GB onto a disc? Yes—though in reality, the burned discs actually contain about 22.5GB, due to the whole “how many bytes are in a megabyte?” problem. And finally, the big question: Is Blu-ray worth the cost? The answer is, to put it bluntly, hell no.

Let’s look at the reasons to pass on this drive. The most obvious is cost. At $1,000 the BD-R 101A costs more than a decent PC—an insane price for an optical drive. Second, it’s not very fast, for burning either Blu-ray recordable (BD-R) or DVD-R. It burns DVDs at just 8x, and burns Blu-ray at 2x—which translates into a pokey 9MB per second. The drive’s slow speed makes it very quiet, but it takes a whopping 45 minutes and 18 seconds to burn a 22.5GB disc.

It gets worse. The BD-R 101A can’t read or write to CD, which is a massive oversight from the perspective of gamers and music lovers. Furthermore, the drive doesn’t come with software to watch Blu-ray movies, and there isn’t any third-party player software available at this time. Pioneer ships a bare-bones version of Roxio with the drive, which lets you burn data discs, but that’s about it. The dearth of software is even more surprising given this drive’s outrageous price.

For mere mortals, this drive simply isn’t worth the money. When speeds ramp up and media and movies are more readily available, it’ll be a more attractive prospect. For now, it’s nothing more than a novelty.

Month Reviewed: October 2006

Verdict: 4

URL: www.pioneerelectronics.com