Hitachi claims world's fastest laptop drive

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Hitachi has launched what it claimed is the industry's highest-capacity, highest-performing notebook hard drive. The drive also comes with optional data encryption features.

The 200GB Travelstar 7K200 hard drive is double the size of its predecessor and has optional hard-drive level "Bulk Data Encryption" technology. The company claimed that the disk also has a 22 per cent performance improvement from previous drives.

Hitachi said that Dell and Alienware would be putting the drives into their laptop systems. Customers will be able to buy systems with a dual hard drive configuration on the Aurora m9700 and the XPS M2010.

According to figures released by Hitachi, the Travelstar 7K200 has between 18 and 33 per cent faster application performance than competitive 7200 RPM and 5400 RPM 2.5-inch hard drives. As well as this it said the disk had the same power requirements as a slower 5400RPM drive and this meant the disk allowed for longer battery life in laptops. It will also be quieter than most drives as well with 25 decibels of noise when idle and 29 decibels when in operation (for the 200GB model)

According to Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies the new hard drive was "rock star of our mobile hard drive family both for its technical merits and its desirability".

The drives will be available for retail this summer with a suggested price tag of $249 (£124).

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