Fujitsu, Hitachi Have Notebook Drives

Fujitsu Ltd. (Tokyo: 6702; London: FUJ; OTC: FJTSY) and Hitachi Ltd. (NYSE: HIT; Paris: PHA) on Tuesday introduced notebook hard-disk drives that use less power than previous generations and are friendlier to the environment.

The drives are in the 2.5-inch form factor favored by mobile PC manufacturers, have maximum capacities of 500 GB, and run at 5,400 revolutions per minute. Fujitsu's latest models are the MJA2 BH and the MJA2 CH, which includes disk-level data encryption. Hitachi's latest mobile HDDs include the Travelstar 5K500.B and E5K500.B. The latter is designed for applications running 24 hours in low-transaction environments, such as blade servers, network routers, point-of-sale terminals, and video-surveillance systems.

All the drives are halogen-free, which means fewer hazardous materials are used in their production. In addition, the drives have a read/write power consumption of 1.4 watts at 500-GB capacities. In the case of Fujitsu, that's 33% less power than previous generations. The drives also have 3 Gbps SATA interfaces.

For encryption, the Fujitsu MJA2 CH supports the Advanced Encryption Standard adopted by the U.S. government. The Hitachi drives are available with optional data encryption that will meet the forthcoming Storage Security specification established by the Trusted Computing Group, an industry group started by Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Infineon Technologies AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: IFX), Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), and Sun Microsystems Inc.