ASUS debuts Hitachi-powered 1 terabyte laptop

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 03 January 2008 15:25

Business IT - Technology

Hitachi has come up with a 2.5 inch hard drive with a 500Gbyte capacity, and ASUS has stuffed two of these into its new M70 laptop to give it a one terabyte storage capacity. If you have trouble comprehending that think of it as 1000 hours of video, or 350 feature length movies or 250,000 four minute songs. To put it another way, you could store enough movies to watch a different movie every night for a year. And should you choose to populate your hard drive with legitimate songs from Apple's iTunes, bought singly at the current rate of $A1.69 per track, you would not have much change left from half a million dollars. Bit like having a car that will do a couple of hundred clicks when there's a mandatory 110km speed limit.

Never mind. According to Hitachi, "consumers expect their notebook PCs to be entertainment powerhouses, storing and providing easy access to massive libraries of high-definition movies, music and photos." All downloaded legitimately of course.

The Hitachi product that makes this possible is the new Travelstar 5K500 - available in 400GB and 500GB versions - that will debut at this months Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Hitachi will also offer an enhanced-availability (EA) version, called the Travelstar E5K500 - also available in both 400GB and 500GB capacities - which is designed for applications requiring 24x7 operation in lower transaction environments such as blade servers, network routers, point-of-sale terminals and video surveillance systems.

The new drives incorporate Hitachi's patented Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology. This is designed not to protect the drives from serious shocks, that is a separate feature, but from, amongst other things, the vibration produced if you crank up the volume on the inbuilt speakers in your laptop too high.

According to Hitachi, the new drives are extremely energy-efficient. They draw only 1.9 watt when reading or writing and 0.9 watts when idle. As for the ASUS M70, no other details are presently available.