Hitachi to launch quarter terabyte laptop drive

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The quarter terabyte disk will also feature hard-drive-level data encryption (using AES encryption) and a flash memory/hard drive hybrid option for enhanced battery life, greater performance and increased reliability.

It said that the encryption on the hard disk would be at the data level and this allowed data security to be carried out with little to no impact to system speed. The hard disk's data encryption scrambles data using a password-generated key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved.

According to the manufacturer, storing some system functions to flash memory rather than on the disk has many benefits. These benefits, especially for laptops range from longer battery life, faster boot-up time and recovery from hibernation, to greater reliability and higher performance.

Industry analysts IDC predict by 2010, 2.5-inch hard drive annual shipments will double to 224 million units from 118 million in 20063. At that time, Hitachi believes the highest-capacity 2.5-inch product may be in the 750-GB range.

"A growing number of mobile PC users are placing a high value on storage capacity, performance, reliability and security while on the go," said John Rydning, IDC's Research Manager for hard disk drives.

IDC's projection of the 2.5-inch hard drive growth shows the greatest opportunity to be in the portable PC category, followed by gaming consoles, external storage and automotive applications.

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