Fujitsu announces 500GB 2.5in hard disk

Fujitsu has today announced a 500GB 2.5in hard disk drive, making it the third manufacturer to make the significant step up to 500GB in the smaller form factor.

The company follows Hitachi and Samsung, which announced drives at CES earlier this year.

The MHZ2 BT is a 4,200 rpm SATA drive offering an average seek time of 12ms read and 14ms write, and sports an 8MB buffer. Fujitsu claims a transfer rate of 300MB/sec.

The drives extra capacity comes at the expense of extra thickness over lower capacity drives, due to the addition of a third platter, taking it from a standard 9.5mm high to 12.5mm. As such, it won't fit into average notebooks, thus rendering it unsuitable as an end-user upgrade.

Shingo Yamazaki, a spokesman for Fujitsu UK, told IT PRO confirmed that it was aimed at laptops and consumer devices such as set-top boxes and PVRs. When asked about specific companies, he said that, "we do not disclose the name of our customers", but added that Fujistu would be working with companies that it had a long standing relationship with.

Fujitsu is also making much of the drives 1.8W typical power draw, claiming that this ranks it as one of the most power efficient drives in the industry. The MHZ2 BT is also fully RoHS compliant, an EU directive that limits the use of hazardous substances.

Fujitsu says that the MHZ2 BT will be on sale from May 2008.

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