It is another step towards huge storage capacity for laptops. Hitachi is at the 500 GB level:

“…The Travelstar 5K500, which is the highest capacity drive yet developed for portable PCs, is due to begin shipping in February and should go some way towards quenching user thirst for storage space.

“…The 5,400-rpm drive offers a 5.5-millisecond average latency and 12-millisecond average read time. It comes with a SATA (Serial ATA) interface that supports 3Gbps data transfer although this drops to 1.5Gbps when the optical disc encryption is turned on. The drive consumers 0.95 watts at idle and 0.7 watts at low-power idle, which is only slightly more than Hitachi’s previous two platter laptop drives, Swezey said.”

link: Hitachi unveils first laptop 500GB drive

The four hundred dollar price point seems to be a bit expensive, especially compared to an external hard drive system. While an external hard drive system does not add to the portability, it does add flexibility with instantaneous changes of storage systems. The one pessimistic thought about such laptop hard drive storage space is that a loss of data on such a machine could trigger a monstrous security breach. It could expose millions and millions of sensitive files to identity theft.

Catherine Forsythe
Director of Operations
FlyingHamster