Hitachi Global Storage Technologies recently announced the release of the Travelstar 7K320 a 7200 rpm, 2.5 inch (laptop) hard disk drive available in capacities ranging from 80GB to 320GB.

Whilst offering higher capacity than the Travelstar 7K200 drive it replaces (a 7,200 rpm hard drive family with an upper capacity of 200GB) it also offers other headlining features such as:

• Increased application performance of up to 12 percent over the previous range.
• 22% less power consumption
• Bulk data encryption using AES 128*

The 7K320 offers desktop preformance for laptop computers, or indeed small form factor, relatively high capacity storage for small form factor desktop computer systems.

The product is released at the end of the month, there is currently no word from Hitachi as to which OEM's will be incorporating the drive into their products however it is expected that high end high performance laptops such as Apple's MacBook Pro, The Dell XPS range etc are likely candidates for the new drives.

* Hitachi's Bulk Disk Encryption is a 128 bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES 128) implementation which is provided by the SoC (System on Chip) in the drive electronics. This is essentially HDD controlled full disk encryption with a fast erase option. The fast eras option itself is simply the destruction of the encryption key, leaving the encrypted data on the hard drive platters, due to the security of the AES 128 standard this should not be considered a security issue at this time.

There are a number of different versions of this particular drive family, to aid your understanding of which drives support encryption and which do not we have compiled the following:

Standard models
HTS723232L9A360
HTS723225L9A360
HTS723216L9A360
HTS723212L9A360
HTS723280L9A360
 
BDE (Bulk Disk Encryption) Option Models
HTS723232L9SA61
HTS723225L9SA61
HTS723216L9SA61
HTS723212L9SA61
HTS723280L9SA61

EA (Enhanced Availability) Models
HTE723232L9A300
HTE723225L9A300
HTE723216L9A300
HTE723212L9A300

EA drives are designed for 24x7 data access to enable round the clock operation.

abc Data Recovery Ltd provide data retrieval services for all major hard disk brands.  You can read more about our Hitachi Data Recovery Services here, we also offer Travelstar recovery.