Hitachi debuts 160GB 2.5-inch perpendicular HDD

Hitachi has achieved its goal by shipping today the most reliable and technically-advanced 2.5-inch hard drive in the Travelstar 5K160. The 160GB Travelstar 5K160 is a 5400 RPM 2.5-inch hard drive designed for notebook and mobile computing.

So impressive is Hitachi's new PMR implementation that the company has dubbed the Travelstar 5K160 the "Super-pendicular Drive" for its best-of-breed reliability performance and leadership specifications. The same winning technology and process used to implement PMR on the Travelstar 5K160 will be replicated across Hitachi's product lines, including the next-generation 1.8-inch hard drive, slated for delivery in the latter half of 2006.

The top three contributors to hard-drive reliability are technologies that most strongly resist media corrosion, head instability and head/disk interference. Hitachi has addressed these factors through the following mechanisms, which have significantly impacted overall drive reliability:

Implementation of Hitachi-unique alloy combination and layer-deposition process produced PMR media with best-of-breed properties for corrosion resistance;

Use of new PMR write head greatly improved soft error rate through ability to write smaller data bits more sharply and with greater fidelity;

Use of the read-head alloy iridium-manganese-chromium (IrMnCr) showed more than a 2X improvement in field reliability among available hard drives using the new IrMnCr read sensor (separately announced today; see Hitachi's animated video for explanation of IrMnCr http://www.hitachigst.com.license2read).

The Travelstar 5K160 will be available in US retail locations this summer at an MSRP of $269 USD for the 160-GB product. A Travelstar 5K160 Notebook Upgrade Kit will also be available at $299 USD.