Hitachi debuts fast, power-saving notebook drive

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the company formed when Japan’s Hitachi bought IBM’s hard disk drive business, announced Wednesday the development of a notebook computer hard disk drive that stands to offer users higher performance with little penalty on battery life.

The secret to Hitachi’s new 2.5-inch drive, the Travelstar 7K60, is the miniaturization of a small slider that supports the drive’s read/write head. The slider, which is less than 1mm square, has been made 30 percent smaller and its mass has been reduced by 60 percent compared to those used in drives until now.

On such a small component that change doesn’t sound like much, but it is enough to counter the increase in aerodynamic resistance usually encountered when the disk spins at a higher speed. That means no extra power is needed to drive a disk using the new slider at 7,200 rpm (revolutions per minute) than for a 5,400 rpm disk using the old slider, said Bill Healy, San Jose, Calif.-based general manager of the company’s mobile business unit in a telephone interview.

“You’d expect 7,200 rpm to require more ongoing power but that is not the case,” he said. “The power [while in use] is the same although there is a slight variation in the start-up power.”

With the jump to 7,200 rpm, drive speed is around a third faster than 5,400 rpm drives although users will see a 15 percent increase in the read/write speed against an equivalent drive. This is because the data is not packed as tightly on the surface of the new drive and so it takes longer to read or write any given amount of information, said Healy. Rotational latency, or the time it takes to get data under the head, has been improved by 20 percent and the average seek time has also been improved by 20 percent, said the company.

Development of the new slider, named a femto-slider, has been underway for several years, said Healy. The previous generation of sliders, called pico-sliders, were introduced around five or six years ago and femto-slider development has been on going since then, he said. Both Hitachi and IBM have been working on designs for femto-sliders and the technology built into the new drive comes from the IBM research.

The new drive has a capacity of 60GB and will be commercially available soon. Samples are already being supplied to major customers and IBM is expected to become the first notebook maker to include it in a product when it ships new models of Thinkpad in the middle of this year, said Healy. The Travelstar 7K60 will cost around $300.

“Almost all the major notebook manufacturers have been anticipating this drive from Hitachi,” said Healy.

At the same time, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced a second, new notebook drive. The Travelstar 5K80 is a 80GB 2.5-inch hard disk drive with rotational speed of 5,400 rpm. That drive will also be available shortly and carries a similar price tag to the lower capacity but higher performance Travelstar 7K60.