Storage options widen for office and home users

Hitachi's new Travelstar drives max out at 750GB

Western Digital and Hitachi have each unveiled new additions to their hard disk storage lines.

Hitachi said that its Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 drives bring a whole new category of capacity to the 2.5in hard drive market by boosting the disk's physical sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes.

The 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM drives will boost capacity to 375GB per platter. When used in multi-platter configurations, the drives will offer capacities of 500GB, 640GB and 750GB.

In addition to notebook and desktop systems, Hitachi is also planning versions of the drives for blade servers, network routers and surveillance systems.

Western Digital, meanwhile, is updating its My Book and My Passport external hard drive lines.

The new drives will support capacities of up to 3TB and be equipped with USB 3.0 connections. The company said that systems equipped with USB 3.0 will be able to transfer data from the drives at speeds as high as 5Gbit/s.

The company said that the drives would primarily target users looking to backup and archive large multimedia files from their PCs.

"Most homes already have thousands of photos and music files, increasing the need for storage around the house," said Western Digital branded products vice president of marketing Dale Pistilli.

"Having the extra capacity to store these files and move them around quickly is becoming a big issue for many consumers around the world."