X-bit labs

Hitachi Travelstar 7K60 HDD: 7,200rpm Achieved! (page 2)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 01/20/2004 | 11:40 PM ]

Hitachi HDDs

Having received the HDD division from IBM, Hitachi has now become one of the most prominent manufacturers of 2.5” hard disk drives in this world. I should acknowledge that the company was not satisfied with an immediate gain resulting from the merger of the two manufactures, and continued working on new notebook hard disks. This article is devoted to one of the latest products developed by Hitachi in this field.

Travelstar 7K60 HTS726060M9AT00

As you can guess from the name of the product family including only one model, The number “7” in the very beginning of the model name indicates the spindle rotation speed of 7,200rpm, and the two last digits stand for the storage capacity of 60GB. The drive uses two platters with the maximum data density of 30GB and four read/write heads. The buffer size is 8MB, the average seek time is 10msec, and the latency equals 4.2msec. The drive can withstand a non-operational shock of 1000g and an operational shock of 200g. The drive supports ATA-6 interface.

Some technologies, that define the nature of the product, have proven their efficiency back in 2.5” HDDs from IBM. For example, we could mention the special AFC magnetic layer aka antiferromagnetically-coupled “pixie dust” media, which allows higher data density.

The giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads of the drive are highly sensitive to the magnetic fields of the platter, which makes allows increasing the capacity further.

The drive works on a fluid dynamic bearing motor that provides good shock absorption and better acoustic characteristics compared to the models built on traditional frictionless bearings.

Again, the spindle rotation speed of 7,200rpm brings about a significant performance gain over traditional 5,400rpm models. According to Hitachi, the data-transfer rate goes up by 15%, the latency is reduced by 20% and the average seek time becomes 20% faster.