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Hitachi on Wednesday announced the shipment of more than 25 million Travelstar Z-series, 7mm hard drives for notebooks, ultra-thins, Ultrabooks, and other portable form factors that support slim 2.5-inch storage devices. It's the sort of thing companies like to brag about, but rather than gloat over record shipment numbers, Hitachi spent the bulk of its press release talking about the 7mm form factor and its new 500GB Travelstar Z7K500 drive, supposedly the industry's fastest and highest capacity single-disk 7200RPM hard drive.

The Travelstar Z7K500 features a 6Gbps SATA interface and 32MB of cache. Hitachi says it offers up to 33 percent better performance in PCMark Vantage than other 2.5-inch hard drives on the market, and it does it while sipping on just 1.8 watts of read/write power (0.8W when idle). In addition to the 500GB model, the Z7K500 is also available in 320GB and 250GB capacities.

Hitachi envisions its 7mm drives being combined with a small amount of SSD cache in tomorrow's Ultrabook models, a combination that could provide ample storage space and high performance without breaking the bank.

"We expect cache SSD shipments to soar over the next couple of years due to the rise in Ultrabook demand," said Ryan Chien, research associate for memory & storage at IHS. "Shipments of cache SSD units in 2012 are projected to reach 25.7 million units – a 2,817 percent increase compared to 2011 – and will reach approximately 121 million units by 2015. This growth is extremely significant for HDD manufacturers, as combining slim magnetic storage with caching SSDs gives customers high-speed access to massive amounts of storage at an affordable price."

Volume shipments of Hitachi's new Travelstar Z7K500 will begin in March.

Image Credit: Hitachi