After one of Hitachi's joint-ventures, HLDS, announced yesterday their ODD/SSD HybridDrive, it's now about time for the much better-known Hitachi GST to roll out an interesting novelty, namely its new 375GB/platter, 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM, 2.5-inch hard drives – the Travelstar 5K750 and the Travelstar 7K750 hard drive families.

The Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 drive families are the first Hitachi GST hard drives that feature Advanced Format, a technology that increases the physical sector size on hard drives from 512 bytes to 4096 (4K) bytes, thus helping utilize the storage surface area more efficiently, allowing for increased drive capacities and improved data integrity at higher storage densities.

The Travelstar 5K750 family targets the mainstream mobile hard drive segment and features a 5,400 RPM, an 8 MB buffer and a Serial ATA 3Gb/s interface for fast data transfer rates.

The Travelstar 5K750 family has been designed with superior low power consumption for energy efficiency, offering 0.5 watts low power idle and 1.4 watts power during read/write operations, which contributes to longer battery life in notebooks and other unplugged applications.

The new Travelstar 5K750 also offers the best non operating shock at 1000G/1ms to protect against bumps and rough handling in mobile environments.

The Travelstar 7K750, on the other hand, is the latest hard drive in Hitachi’s most popular 7,200 RPM family, that meets the growing demand for performance computing.

With a 16MB buffer, 3Gb/s SATA interface, and very good media transfer rates, Hitachi Travelstar 7K750 series allows quicker access to data and faster system performance, especially for multi-tasking, and other high performance office and home applications.

With the lowest read/write power specification in its class at 1.8W, users don’t have to sacrifice battery life for fast 7,200 RPM performance.

Both Hitachi Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 families feature very good resilience to operating shock, Thermal Fly-height Control (TFC) for better soft error rate and improved reliability, and Hitachi’s TrueTrack Technology for tracking accuracy in high shock or vibration environments.  

The fluid dynamic bearing motors also deliver a near silent operation, while the Travelstar 7K750 is a self-encrypting drive (SED) that encrypts data using protected keys in real time, providing users with the highest level of data protection available.

Designed specifically for use in blade servers, network routers and video surveillance systems, the new Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 EA models bring together a host of features such as high capacity, durability and low power for applications needing 24x7 access to data.

The Travelstar 5K750 is currently shipping in volume, with Hitachi Travelstar 5K750 Retail Hard Drive Kits being set to become available in November with a suggested retail price of $129.99, while the 7,200 RPM Travelstar 7K750 family, including EA versions and retail kits, will be available in Q1 2011.