Hitachi ships 200GB, 7200 RPM hard drive

Hitachi today announced that it has started shipping the TravelStar 7K200. The notebook drive is the industry's first to store 200GB while maintaining a desktop-class 7200 RPM speed, and improves even on earlier performance drives: the 7K200 is roughly 18 to 33 percent faster than previous drives operating at the same speed, the company's storage division claims. The updated TravelStar also consumes roughly the same power as 5400 RPM drives and is designed to be quiet enough for watching movies and other clips directly from the hard disk.

The new drive also offers an added layer of security rarely seen in notebook drives, Hitachi notes. A technique dubbed Bulk Data Encryption can be switched on to dynamically encrypt and decrypt data as it's written to and read from the drive, reducing the chances that information will be stolen through a software hack. Old drives' information can be locked away from access simply by deleting the encryption key that handles traffic.

While the 7K200 will be available to many notebook manufacturers in the near future, the first company to use the 200GB disk in its notebooks will be Dell, which is selling the drive immediately as an upgrade for its XPS performance notebooks as well as all portable systems from its Alienware gaming brand.