Hitachi Offers License To Drive Faster

Mobile professionals demand powerful and robust notebooks to juggle their fast-paced, data-laden activities. With the new Travelstar 7K200 hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, system builders now can build laptops that can handle the load.

PRODUCT NAME: Travelstar 7K200 PRICE: $249 DISTRIBUTORS/ INTEGRATORS: Bell Microproducts, Ingram Micro, Synnex, Information Technologies COMPANY: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies San Jose, Calif. (800) 801-4618 www.hitachigst.com

The Travelstar 7K200 hard-disk drive is a high-capacity, high-performance laptop drive. CRN engineers tested a 200-Gbyte SATA drive with a 1.5 GBps encrypted interface, although the drive is also available with a 3 GBps or 1.5 GBps unencrypted interface. The hardware-based data encryption technology is optional.

Travelstar 7K200's 200-Gbyte storage capacity does not make it the largest drive on the market. However, the Hitachi drive may be one of the fastest. The 7K200 drive has a spin rate of 7,200 rpm, compared with the more common 5,400-rpm speed.

Generally, a higher spin rate means higher performance, such as faster file copying and document retrieval, better graphics and faster performance. There is typically a cost—all of these tasks can drain the laptop battery faster. The Test Center noted, however, that the 7K200's power consumption did not drastically impact battery life and was comparable to its 5,400-rpm counterparts.

The built-in bulk data encryption ensures all data written to the disk is scrambled and protected. While there are software products that can encrypt data written to the drive, it can be expensive and take up CPU processing time. A hardware-based solution doesn't add a load on the CPU during encryption and decryption as it reads and writes data, so performance is not impacted.

The Secure Erase feature makes repurposing and discarding the drive easier. Once the encryption key is deleted, the data on the drive is unreadable, and remains so after a new key is generated.