Hitachi recently announced the introduction of world’s most capacious hard disk for laptops, which reaches a whooping 500GB, but also costs about $400.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) issued a press release announcing the worldwide debut of the roomy, 2.5-inch mobile HDD for February this year. Dubbed Travelstar 5K500, the HDD is set to establish a new record for the industry and to open a new era of “ ‘slim’ desktops, full-featured notebooks, gaming consoles and other advanced applications for consumers on-the-go.”

Using a technology called perpendicular magnetic recording (or PMR, capable of delivering up to 10 times the storage density of longitudinal recording, on the same recording media) Hitachi managed to come up with not one, but two Travelstar 5K500. The first one is “only” 400GB in size (and costing $350), while the second one costs $400 and packs a whooping amount of gigabytes (500) under the tiny hood. To give you an idea of what that means, just imagine that the half-terabyte drive can store up to 500 hours of digital video, 178 feature length movies, 250 games or 125,000 four-minute songs. Both models come with a 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) interface.

The Japanese electronics behemoth will also ready an enhanced-availability (EA) version, called the Travelstar E5K500 -- also available in both 400GB and 500GB capacities -- which is designed for applications requiring 24x7 operation in lower transaction environments, such as blade servers, network routers, point-of-sale terminals and video surveillance systems.

Among the plethora of features included with every Travelstar 5K500 are:

- the Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology, which senses in advance a possible disturbance (mainly from the speakers of the laptop) and takes the necessary steps to stabilize the drive head and avoid any disruptions.
- 400Gs of shock protection against falls, bumps and rough handling.
- Bulk Data Encryption (BDE, a hard-drive level encryption that provides improved performance and a higher level of security.