Hitachi Launches Perpendicular Hard Drive

The storage market right now is in the middle of a quiet revolution with the arrival of perpendicular recording technology which is replacing the existing methods of disk storage. In line with this, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies today announced its 5-inch 160 GB Travelstar device based on perpendicular recording methods. Announced Monday, the Travelstar 5K160 has 5400 RPMs and is aimed at the notebook and mobile computing markets. “The 5K160 2.5-inch hard disk drive is a good example of how the hard disk drive industry continues to make excellent progress in improving not only the capacity of 2.5-inch drives for notebooks, but also the basic reliability and robustness,” said Mr. Takagi, director, IT Products Division at Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., in a statement. Perpendicular drives are being developed by other manufacturers including Seagate who has already launched its products based on this new platform.