Hitachi unveils its latest Travelstar model, the Z5K500. The HDD carries either 500GB, 320GB or 250GB in a one-disk, 5400RPM, 7mm z-height model.
The drives are designed as a replacement for the standard 2.5" 9.5mm drives in external drives, laptops and blade servers.
The company says its Z5K500 drive family has the best cost per GB and GG/mm3 when compared to SSDs and 2.5" and 1.8" 9.5mm HDDs.
The drives feature 1.8W read/write power and 0.55W low power idle, as well as 8MB cache and SATA 3Gb/sec interface. Common connectors and mounting points also feature.
As part of Hitachi's second Advanced Format generation, the drives' physical sector size is up from 512 bytes to 4096 (4K) bytes, improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.