Hitachi debuts 7mm thin 2.5-inch 320GB 7200RPM HDD

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced the industry’s broadest family of ultra slim and light 7mm z-height drives. Whether customers need a slim 7mm drive that is the highest capacity, fastest or tuned precisely for A/V streaming, the new Hitachi Z-series family of Travelstar and CinemaStar drives delivers on the company’s proven strengths of reliability, low-power consumption, exceptional shock resistance and quiet acoustics. With the entire family offered in capacities up to 320GB – the industry’s highest 7mm drive capacity in a one-disk design – Hitachi is at the forefront, leading the shift from 9.5mm 2.5-inch drives to 7mm 2.5-inch drives across a broad range of market segments.

From laptops and handhelds to PVRs and blade servers, Hitachi’s new 7mm Z-series family of Travelstar and CinemaStar drives are designed as a direct replacement for today’s standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm hard drives. All Hitachi Z-series drives feature common connectors and common mounting points for simple integration into existing systems, and enable greater design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new, thinner, lighter and more robust devices.

When combining cost per gigabyte and gigabyte per cubic millimeter (GB/mm3), Hitachi 7mm drives are the most cost-effective and space-efficient storage solutions when compared to solid state drives (SSD), 2.5-inch 9.5 mm and 1.8-inch hard drives, offering a compelling value proposition for OEMs and system integrators.

Largely cost prohibitive for the mainstream ultra-portable consumer market, SSDs can be 17 times, and 1.8-inch drives can be up to seven times more expensive on a cost per gigabyte basis when compared to the new Hitachi Z-series drives. When comparing GB/mm3, Hitachi 7mm drives are 36 percent more space efficient than 2.5-inch SSDs and 9.5mm hard drives, while offering 73 percent more space efficiency than 1.8 inch SSDs. By using Hitachi Z-series drives, manu¬facturers can utilize space savings to design thinner devices, increase shock robustness, improve unplugged time by using a larger battery or allow for enhanced cooling and air flow due to the thinner hard drive design. Hitachi’s new 7mm Z-series drives will also help achieve greater logistics efficiency relative to current 9.5mm designs by enabling new packaging designs that improve pallet density. These smaller, thinner and lighter systems with reduced packaging sizes give manufactures, and even Hitachi, the ability to optimize volumetric weight and consolidate the number of shipments; thereby reducing shipment costs while reducing the overall impact on resources and the environment.