HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NASDAQ: WDC) continues to push technology innovation by offering the highest storage density (MB/mm³) of any hard disk drive (HDD) today. The new Travelstar® 5K1500 is the industry’s first 9.5mm, 1.5TB mobile hard drive and features the industry’s highest capacity in a standard 9.5mm design. Built on HGST’s proven platform for quality and reliability, the Travelstar 5K1500 delivers high shock protection, low power and solid performance to meet the growing demands for a variety of market segments, including notebooks, external hard drives, gaming consoles and all-in-one desktop PCs.

The HGST three-platter Travelstar 5K1500 offers 50 percent more capacity than currently shipping 1TB 2.5-inch 9.5mm HDDs and 200 percent more capacity than single-disk 500GB 7mm or 5mm 2.5-inch HDDs, making them ideal for capacity-hungry devices. With better PCMark® Vantage and PCMark 7 performance than currently shipping two-platter HGST 5,400RPM models, all Travelstar 5K1500 drives ship with a 32MB cache buffer and 6Gbps SATA interface.

Smaller than current 15mm or 12.5mm 2.5-inch HDDs, the Travelstar 5K1500 drive features a standard 9.5mm form factor for simple integration into many traditional system designs. This allows OEMs and system integrators to take advantage of its huge capacity, 0.5 watt low power idle and 5,400RPM performance to deliver new high-capacity, power-efficient systems for longer battery life in notebooks and other unplugged applications. With only 2.5 bels idle, the 1.5TB Travelstar 5K1500 drive is also whisper quiet. The new Travelstar 5K1500 family offers the best operating shock at 400G/2ms and non-operating shock at 1000G/1ms to protect against bumps and rough handling in mobile environments. A dual stage actuator is included for track miss registration improvements for greater data integrity and reliability. All Travelstar drives use halogen-free components to support the “green” computing initiatives that are of increasing importance to today’s end users.

"We are excited to have the opportunity to offer HGST's new 1.5TB HDD to our notebook PC customers. It is quite a feat of engineering to fit the third disk into the standard mobile form factor while maintaining shock robustness. This should reinforce Asus's  leadership position with the enthusiast consumer segment where having plenty of capacity to store high resolution photos and HD video is an important capability," said Shian Hsu, corporate vice president and general manager of NB Business Unit, Asus.

“Contrary to popular belief, the mobile hard drive market is not being replaced by SSDs. We continue to invest in and serve both the traditional 9.5mm and 7mm thin and light HDD mobile markets as they offer the best cost-per-GB, performance and proven product reliability for high-capacity, mainstream, Ultrabook® and A/V content creation notebook markets,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST.  “HGST continues to have a strong share in the 2.5-inch market and the new Travelstar 5K1500 hard drive is the latest addition to our broad line of 5,400 and 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch drives, giving OEMs, ODMs and integrators an opportunity to grow and differentiate their product lines.”

“The PC continues to be an important productivity platform for content creators, who represent an echelon of users that value high-capacity portable storage," said John Rydning, research vice president for hard disk drives at IDC.  "HGST's new mobile 1.5TB hard disk drive in a standard form factor for notebook PCs provides the highest capacity solution available today for users seeking more storage capacity inside their notebook PC.”

The new 1.5TB Travelstar 5K1500 is also available in an Enhanced Availability (EA) model, which brings together a host of features such as high capacity, durability and low power for blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and other systems needing 24x7 access to data. The Travelstar 5K1500 drive helps system designers, integrators and IT managers build and maintain their storage systems, achieving greater storage density in the same 2.5-inch footprint, while maximizing performance, and improving data integrity in “always-on” applications in lower-transaction environments.

Availability

Travelstar 5K1500 drives are expected to ship in June. The EA model, and the optional self-encrypting Travelstar 5K1500 model, which is designed to meet the Trusted Computer Group (TCG) Opal Storage Security specification, are expected to be available in 3Q 2013.