IBM / Hitachi Travelstar 60GH Hard Drives

Leading Edge Technology

IBM continues its tradition of mobile storage leadership with the IBM Travelstar 60GH and 40GN hard drives. The Travelstar 60GH is the industry's first 60GB notebook hard disk drive employing four disks in a 12.5mm high design and is the fourth generation of 5,400rpm mobile drives in the industry.

The innovative hard drive design combines AFC Media, Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motor technology, an ATA-100 interface, IBM giant magnetoresistive (GMR) head technology, Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML) digital channel, a head load/unload feature, and Enhanced Adaptive Battery Life Extender (ABLE) 3.0.This design provides the exceptional quietness, storage capacity, performance, power management, quality, and reliability required by today's notebook systems.

The Travelstar family of hard disk drives incorporates the latest IBM storage technology, antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media, informally known as (pixie dust). This technology sandwiches a three atom thick layer of ruthenium, a precious metal, between two magnetic layers on a disk, allowing for a higher areal density, breaking through limitations of the super paramagnetic effect.

As a result, the new IBM Travelstar drives are suitable for demanding, high capacity Internet, digital audio, video streaming, and real time multimedia applications whether users are in the office or on the road. In non traditional applications, Travelstar drives can now incorporate into such products as Point-of-Sale Systems, Set Top Boxes, Telemetry (automobile) applications, and communications and entertainment systems.

Performance and Reliability

The IBM Travelstar 60GH and 40GN hard drives use proven IBM technology such as TrueTrack Servo, IBM Drive Fitness Test (DFT), and Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.), as well as a thermistor, an adaptive control device that helps maintain high performance and fast seek times at high environmental temperatures.

Enhanced Availability Models

IBM also offers enhanced availability features on selected new Travelstar models. These industry first models increase the hard disk drive's available "power-on" hours for emerging applications with continuous operation. At a read/write or data access rate of up to 50 percent—a typical usage cycle for 24x7 blade server environments—the drives are designed to allow users to leave these drives powered on around-the-clock.

Advanced Mobile Systems

With these new drives, IBM has once again redefined state-of-the-art storage for mobile computing. The reduced acoustics, high speeds, and capacities of IBM Travelstar drives support superior digital content creation capabilities, higher quality digital audio and video, and significantly faster processing for data intensive multimedia and Internet application.

By using one of the new Travelstar drives in a laptop system, you can unchain your multimedia studio from the desktop, enabling high end multimedia creativity as mobile as your imagination.

   Highlights

• IBM advances its notebook hard drive leadership with the highest capacity, highest performing drives.
• IBM offers new models that operate with the Enhanced Availability feature.
• 60GH—the fourth generation of 5,400rpm models—offers highest capacity and highest performance in the industry with a 60GB capacity.
• 40GN provides areal densities of up to 34Gbits/sq.inch, yielding up to 20GB of capacity per disk.
• All models contain Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motor technology for industry-leading idle and operating acoustic performance.
• Travelstar provides industry-leading operational shock rating of up to 200Gs (2ms).
• Travelstar leverages latest antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media, also known as “pixie dust”.