Hitachi adds flash, encryption to mobile drives Rick Merritt EE Times (10/31/2006 11:56 PM EST) SAN JOSE -- Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will push capacity to 200 Gbytes and beyond while adding encryption and flash memory to its 2.5-inch hard disk drives in 2007, the company announced Wednesday (Nov. 1). The 2.5-inch segment is growing rapidly, but one-inch drives, also a focus for Hitachi GST, have stalled because flash memory dominates in cellphones and low-end MP3 players. Hitachi GST said it will launch two new 2.5-inch drives in 2007, a 200Gbyte model with media rotating at 7,200 RPMs for fast access speed. It will also ship a 250+ Gbyte model with the more mainstream 5,400 RPM rotation speed. The drives are the company's second generation to use perpendicular recording. The 7,200 RPM drives could double in unit shipments this year, hitting as much as one million units a quarter industry wide by 2007, said Larry Swezey, director of mobile product strategy and marketing for Hitachi GST. By contrast, drive makers sell as many as 30 million units a quarter of the 5,400 RPM drives. The company will offer hardware encryption and embedded flash memory as an option on all its 2.5-inch drives starting in 2007. Hitachi GST is adopting Microsoft's hybrid hard drive approach used in Windows Vista. The company will put at least 256 Mbytes flash on the hybrid drives. Vista uses the memory as cache to speed boot and access times and save battery life by decreasing the amount of time drives must spin up their disks. Hitachi will not decide exactly how much flash it will embedded in the hybrid drives or how much it will cost until a final version of Vista ships later this year. Initially it will use flash chips from Renesas Technology Corp., its joint venture with Mitsubishi. Other drive makers including Samsung and Seagate Technology are also supplying the hybrid drives. Separately, Hitachi GST is integrating AES encryption hardware in the controllers for all its drives starting in 2007. The feature will be turned on at the factory if requested as an option. The move is an alternative to using encryption software on the PC. "We're getting that off the host and putting it in the drive in real time in hardware. It's a good deal for corporate users concerned about laptop theft," said Swezey. Seagate recently announced it to is putting encryption on many of its future hard drives. The ad hoc Trusted Computing Group is developing a suite of security standards for hard drives, including encryption and authentication, but the specs are still in an early stage, said Swezey. International Data Corp. predicts sales of 2.5-inch drives will grow 22 percent from 2005 to 2010, based on rising shipments of laptops and other computers and embedded systems in which they are used. Meanwhile sales are flat for the novel 8 Gbyte, one-inch drives Hitachi GST also produces. "The driving [OEM] product [for one-inch drives] hasn't materialized yet," Swezey said. "We will be quiet about these drives until next year because we are looking for the marriage of the right application and the capacity it requires," he added. Rapidly falling prices and rising capacity for flash memory have made it a preferred vehicle for mass market products like cellphones and low-end MP3 players. Cellphone companies "haven't figured out the business model or the technology for sending large files over their networks," to drive hard disk demand, Swezey said. Separately Hitachi GST announced it has shipped its millionth drive using perpendicular recording. The company expects to make four million of the drives before the end of the year and to transition its entire 2.5-inch family to perpendicular recording by the end of 2007. Hitachi shipped its first drive with the technology, the Travelstar 5K160, in May.