Seagate Technology announced its Momentus 7200.3 hard drive, the first 7,200-rpm, 320GB hard drive for laptops, now powers Dell XPS laptop and will be available soon.
“Laptop users want every bit of capacity, performance and durability that desktop PCs deliver,” said Michael Wingert, Seagate executive vice president and general manager, Personal Compute Business. “The new Momentus 7200.3 hard drive exemplifies Seagate’s focus on delivering leading storage technologies that make it easier to move, use and protect digital information in the home, in the office and on-the-go.”

Seagate’s new 2.5-inch hard drive delivers up to 320GB of capacity and combines a fast Serial ATA 3.0 Gbit/second interface with 7200-rpm spin speed and a 16MB cache to enable the highest-performance laptops ever. The drive also is offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology, to help prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity, then parking the head off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as eight inches.

Phoenix Technologies has announced it is working with Fujitsu to enable remote disk control and disk data protection for laptops equipped with Fujitsu’s new full disk encryption (FDE) 2.5″ 7,200rpm SATA hard disk drives.

With Phoenix FailSafe technology, the laptop owner can remotely disable the Fujitsu FDE drive in the laptop, thus ensuring “failsafe” protection against data theft and personal information loss.

Phoenix FailSafe also provides the ability to locate/recover missing laptops and lost data as well as remotely ‘kill’ sensitive data or the device to avoid potential misuse.

Western Digital has unveiled the new SATA Velociraptor, their latest and greatest in speedy HDD. Connecting through 3GB/s SATA, the 300GB, 10,000RPM Velociraptor is actually a 2.5″ hard drive with a massive “Icepack” heatsink that makes it large enough to fit in a 3.5″ bay.

Press release:

WD(R) Announces WD VelociRaptor(TM) – The World’s Fastest SATA Hard Drive

Next-generation 10,000 RPM, 2.5-inch, 300 GB SATA Hard Drive, WD VelociRaptor is 35 Percent Faster and Twice the Capacity of the Previous Performance King

LAKE FOREST, Calif., April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — WD(R) (NYSE: WDC) announced today that it is now shipping WD VelociRaptor(TM) hard drives, the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA “Raptor” series of drives. Designed with an enterprise-class foundation, the new WD VelociRaptor hard drive is modified specifically for PC and Mac(R) enthusiasts and professional workstations. Destined to become the new high-performance favorite of these groups, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive comes packed with twice the capacity and a 35 percent performance increase over the previous generation.

From the bloodlines of the WD Raptor, the most popular hard drive for high-performance enthusiasts who demand the ultimate SATA drive, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive is built with enterprise-class mechanics and packs 300 GB of storage capacity into a 2.5-inch enterprise form factor. The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drive is enclosed in the IcePack(TM), a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink — a customization that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and keeps this powerful drive extra cool when installed in a high-performance desktop chassis.
“Demand for ever-higher PC performance continues to increase and WD is the leader in this category with the WD Raptor. We created WD VelociRaptor hard drives to lead PC enthusiasts into the next era of PC and Mac storage performance and satisfy their insatiable thirst for computing speed,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD’s enterprise business unit. “The new WD VelociRaptor delivers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives currently on the market.”
WD VelociRaptor is the next step up for the speed-craving PC enthusiast, and as with all WD drives, attention to detail in features, performance and reliability is a top priority. Features of the new WD VelociRaptor hard drives include:

Killer Speed — Built on the performance of the WD Raptor, these 10,000

RPM drives, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and 16 MB cache deliver mind-
bending performance.

Rock-solid Reliability — WD VelociRaptor drives are designed and
manufactured to business-critical, enterprise-class standards to provide
enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. The design
results in the highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at
1.4 million hours MTBF.

IcePack Mounting Frame — The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drives are
enclosed in a 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in
heat sink that keeps this powerful little drive extra cool when installed
in high-performance desktop chassis.

Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF(TM)) — Optimizes performance when
the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.

SecurePark(TM) — Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during
spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording
head never touches the disk surface, resulting in improved long-term
reliability and increased drive protection when the chassis is moved.

Price and Availability
WD VelociRaptor (model WD3000GLFS) hard drives will be available on Alienware’s high-performance ALX gaming desktop by the end of April. At launch, Alienware will offer maximum performance with two 300 GB WD VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 0 configuration on www.alienware.com. WD VelociRaptor hard drives will be shipping exclusively through Alienware this month and will be available through the company’s online store (http://www.shopwd.com) and at select distributors and resellers mid-May. Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD VelociRaptor 300 GB is $299.99 USD. More information about WD VelociRaptor hard drives may be found on the company’s Web site.

Fujitsu announced its new a world’s first 320GB 7200rpm laptop HDD. The 3Gbps SATA-equipped MHZ2 BJ series measures in at a standard 9.5-mm and spins at 7,200rpm with a 16MB cache and 25dB idle noise level. Average seek times are listed at 10.5-ms for data reads and 12.5-ms for writes while drawing 2.3 watts of power. Sales of the new Fujitsu MHZ2 BJ-series begins in June.

Fujitsu has announced its new series of MHZ2 BT 2.5″ hard disk drives with capacity of up to 500 GB. Sales will begin at the end of May 2008.

As an environmentally friendly product, Fujitsu MHZ2 BT use 1.8 W for read and write operations, ranking them among the most power-efficient 2.5″ HDDs in the industry. They are also manufactured in compliance with the EU’s RoHS Directive, which limits the use of hazardous substances.

In addition, the series also supports the Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s interface for high-speed data transfers.

Seagate launches 250GB laptop hard drives, including a model with integrated automatic data encryption. The 250GB drive is part of Seagate’s Momentus line. It spins at 5400rpm and connects to the host computer using a 3Gb/s SATA interface. They contain 8MB of cache.

The 2.5in Momentus 5400.4 line-up also includes 120GB, 160GB and 200GB models. Like the 250GB version, these capacities are what the drive delivers before it’s formatted.