Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, a major maker of hard disk drives (HDDs), have announced the addition of a 250GB hard drive for mobile computers into its lineup. The announcement follows similar unveilings of Fujitsu and Western Digital. As an option, Hitachi offers data encryption feature with its new drive, something that is not available on competing solutions.

Hitachi’s Travelstar 5K250 uses two platters featuring perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, which allowed the company to create 250GB hard drive in 2.5” form-factor. The new Travelstar 5K250 with 250GB capacity has 5400rpm motor, 8MB cache and is compatible with Serial ATA-150 interface. Hitachi also plans to ship E5K250 HDD, which sports Serial ATA-300 interface. Both types of new drives have 5.5ms average latency and 11.ms average read time.

Optionally, Hitachi offers encryption technology with its Travelstar, which allows to encrypt all the data on the hard disk drive using special hardware and lower the risks that the data may be obtained by third parties. Hitachi’s Bulk Data Encryption tech scrambles data using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambles with the key as it is retrieved. Thus, data encryption at the hard-drive level is generally considered a more sophisticated approach to securing users’ data.

The new 250GB hard drives for notebooks or blade servers will be available on the market shortly. Their pricing remains unclear.

“The Travelstar 5K250 was built from the ground up for notebook PC users who demand high capacity, ruggedness, speed and power efficiency,” said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “With all of the improvements we’ve integrated into the 5K250, we are confident Hitachi will continue to maintain its leadership position in the 2.5” hard disk drive space.”