Don’t look now but notebook hard drives just got a wee bit larger thanks to Hitachi’s latest entry – the Travelstar 5K500. The Travelstar 5K500 is a 2.5 inch hard drive available in both 400GB and 500GB models. According to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the Travelstar 5K500 is designed for slim desktop systems, notebooks, and gaming console systems. Features of the Travelstar 5K500 include:

• Fourth generation Hitachi mobile drive featuring perpendicular magnetic recording technology
• 3.0 Gbps SATA interface
• Patented Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology which acts as an early warning system for the drive
• Three disk design but only uses as much power as a two disk drive
• 1.9 watt read/write power draw
• 0.7 watt low power idle

Hitachi is also making a version of this drive available for “lower-transaction” environments called the Travelstar E5K500. 

The Travelstar 5K500 will be available in February while the Travelstar E5K500 will be available at the end of Q2.

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