New Hitachi 500GB mobile drives

Hitachi announces environmental-friendly drives with increased security and improved energy consumption.

Hitachi, aspiring to the next step in environmental-friendly mobile drives?

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is the last in line of storage drive vendors trying to get a piece of the action from the new, two-platter more environmentally friendly 2.5-inch wide mobile drive market. The two new models presented to the market, feature reduced 1.4-watt power consumption, as well as halogen-free construction.

The Travelstar 5K500.B model comes in a standard notebook drive fashioning, and is expected to ship by next month, whereas a model with "enhanced-availability", the Travelstar E5K500.B, intended for blade servers, network routers and other 24/7 uses, will be available sometime in the first quarter of 2009.

There is as of now, no prices available for any of the models, but these will be announced shortly, according to Larry Swezey, director of hard disk drive marketing and strategy at the San Jose-based subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd.

Another welcome key feature of the Travelstar 5K500.B notebook drive, is the opportunity of optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE), to provide increased data security. BDE encrypts the data using a private security key as it is written to the disk, and then decrypts the data as it is retrieved, according to Hitachi.

This will be in line with the storage security standards and specifications, as established by the Trusted Computing Group, according to Swezey.