SSD (Secured Storage Data) is thought to be the next best thing in hard drive technology for mobile computers. Even though it's tougher, it doesn't reach its market appeal yet. Highly expensive and relatively slow, SSD is still on its baby-phase: It might be years before we could see a 320GB SSD that will not cost us more than a thousand dollars.
For now Hitachi is banking on the good old hard drive. Called the Travelstar 7K320, this laptop hard drive will show you that the soon to be old is not that bad especially for your laptop. Aside from 320GB of storage capacity, the 7200 RPM should turn any laptop junkies head into considering this hard drive. According to their recent press release, the 7K320 promises 60% increase of storage capacity, 12% increase of performance. All of these are possible while driving down 22% of power consumption. With this speed, data transfer is also at its peak. Standard data transfer is 3GB/s while the encrypted transfer is up to 1GB/s. If that speed will never amaze you, nothing will. The 7K320 also promises to be very silent: during operation it only provides 2.8Bels of sound while 2.5Bels of sound is expected when it is not on operation.
What's even better with Hitachi's Travelstar 7K320 is the security it offers. Most of the security that we offer today for our hard drives comes with the software. Hitachi however has developed a built-in security technology that is hardware based. Available during encrypted transfer, Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) scrambles the data while it is being written. After the transfer or writing on the hard drive is done, BDE again reassembles the data so that it could be read by application.
The Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 is expected to hit the market in a few weeks and the price is expected to be from US$200 to US$250.
