Fujitsu Computer Products Of America, Inc., a well known supplier of hard drives, peripherals and biometric products has announced its global launch of the MHX2300BT 2.5" hard drive series, including a 250GB and 300GB HDD. These hard drives feature Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology to enable such high density storage within the limited platter space.
To help lower power consumption on laptops and for cooler running performance, these second generation PMR products have a power consumption of just 1.6 watts during read/write operations and 0.5 watts while idle. They feature a high shock tolerence of 300G (2ms), an SATA 2.5 interface, 4200rpm spindle, hot plug support and near-silent operation. Fujitsu also claims their 300GB model to be the industry's first 2.5" 300GB. The MHX2300BT series, which includes both models will be made available in the first quarter of 2007.
It is unclear at this time what these hard drives will be priced at or what seek time they feature, however these will certainly be useful for those who need a large capacity hard drive on their laptop if the lower spindle speed is not a major concern. In my opinion, when 2.5" hard drives are used externally in a 2.5" case, they make an excellent alternative to carrying data around on rewritable discs. At the moment, the pricing of some 80GB to 120GB 2.5" HDDs works out cheaper by the gigabyte than Blu-ray rewritable media and the 2.5" aluminium HDD enclosure is just under half the size of a DVD case, not to mention that it can be used with just one to two free USB ports, unlike BD-RE discs that require a Blu-ray drive on each PC the media needs to be accessed on.
