Hitachi announced it is ready to ship the 200-gigabyte (GB), 7200 RPM Travelstar  7K200 notebook hard drive. The first computer makers that will integrated the new hard drive in their systems are Dell and Alienware.

Those who need the highest capacity storage found on mobile systems can create dual hard drive configurations with 400GB of available storage on the Aurora m9700 and the XPS M2010.

“The 7200 RPM Travelstar is the rock star of our mobile hard drive family both for its technical merits and its desirability,” said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “The enthusiastic response to date confirms that consumers are ever more sophisticated in their notebook requirements and that the Travelstar has become a status symbol among notebook aficionados. As the industry’s only third-generation 7200 RPM product, we believe the Travelstar 7K200 will continue to accelerate this trend.”

Beside speed Hitachi 7200 RPM Travelstar 7K200 uses offers comparable power consumption, heat emission and acoustics to its 5400 RPM counterparts. The hard drive is based on third-generation perpendicular magnetic recording technology.

Hitachi claims its hard drive offers 18-33 percent faster application performance than competitive 7200 RPM and 5400 RPM 2.5-inch hard drives. This means faster file copying and document retrieval, better graphics and faster game performance.

Travelstar 7K200 integrates Hitachi’s “Bulk Data Encryption4” which provides a higher level of benefit by offering better performance than software-based encryption and a higher level of security than system password protection.

The suggested retail price of Travelstar 7K200 will is $249.