The Hindu : Front Page : Store one terabyte on your laptop

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Sunday, Jan 13, 2008
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Store one terabyte on your laptop

Special Correspondent

Hitachi unveils highest capacity in mobile hard drives

— Photo: Special Arrangement

Jumbo storage: The new Asus M50 or M70 series multimedia notebook comes with two units of Hitachi’s Travelstar 500 GB hard drive, giving a terabyte of storage.

Bangalore: It is time to say goodbye to an era when a few hundred gigabytes of storage was considered adequate for desktop and laptop PCs. The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (U.S.) earlier this week saw Taiwan-based Asus and Japanese player Hitachi combine to create a portable PC with the highest ever on-board disk storage —one terabyte or 1,000 gigabytes. A gigabyte is one billion bytes or chunks of information.

The Asus M50 and M70 series multimedia notebooks will soon be available with this whopping storage: Adequate space for over 2 lakh songs or 1,000 hours of video — enough for some 300 full-length feature films.

Asus was able to offer one terabyte by deploying two units of Hitachi’s just-launched mobile hard disk drive, Travelstar 5K500, which claims the world’s highest storage capacity — 500 GB — in the compact 2.5-inch size created for portable PCs. Hitachi has achieved this by going “triple desk” — putting three platters, one on top of the other, each of 167 GB capacity. The zippy serial interface can transfer 3 GBs in a second.

What on earth would customers do with a terabyte storage device? The Asus laptop seems to be aimed at graphics-heavy applications, for users who might want to play or edit high-definition video footage which gobbles up the gigabytes.

But Hitachi is also eyeing another application: Home digital video recorders or DVRs for customers who want to record movies or serials from TV and build up a personal library for more convenient viewing. The company plans to release a variant named Travelstar E5K500 — the ‘E’ for enhanced availability — specially tailored for use in DVRs.

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