Fujitsu's new M250 2.5" notebook drives up the drive speed from 4200 RPM in the previous generation to 5400 RPM. They also improve shock resistance, cut power use by 33 percent, and get rid of polluting halogens. (Source: Fujitsu)
Fujitsu ups its notebook offerings with two impressive new models
Today Fujitsu is unveiling a brand new line of mobile hard drives, which will offer a large capacity as well as featuring full hardware encryption and a number of key incremental improvements. Don Jeanette, a senior product marketing manager with the company was on hand to give DailyTech an exclusive inside peak at the new drives, which will be sure to up the ante for notebooks and other applications.
According to Mr. Jeanette, shipments of 2.5" drives are up to 165-170 million units, with approximately 155 million going to notebooks, and the remainder going to small form factor PCs and gaming consoles. While Fujitsu is only 1 of 6 major notebooks suppliers, Mr. Jeanette believes the company holds approximately 16-20 percent of these sales.
Fujitsu looks to continue its leadership in the 2.5" hard drive market with the new M250 series, available in MJA2 BH and MJA2 CH versions. The basic info is familiar -- the drives run at 5400 RPM and use a SATA interface. Both versions are available in capacities of 250 GB or 500 GB (Fujitsu previously release a 500 GB model, but it was only 4200 RPM). The drive is a 2 platter, 4 head design, so there's a total of 250 GB per platter in the top end model.
The new drives are quite quiet, perfect for low-acoustic PCs, according to Mr. Jeanette. They are also, for the first time, free of halogens and several other hazardous chemicals, an important environmental development. Mr. Jeanette says that going forward Fujitsu plans to build all of its new drives up to this standard, an major green commitment.
Back to the drive itself, the SATA posts pretty average read/write speeds, with a bandwidth of around 3.0 Gb/sec. However, it manages to cut power under full load to 1.4W, while the idle power drops to 0.6W, representing a 33 percent power savings over the previous model, and according to Fujitsu, industry leading performance. This was accomplished through die shrinks on the ASIC chips and other means.
Shock resistance has also been improved from 300 G to 350 G. This was accomplished, according to Mr. Jeanette by making the platters hold less mass, and by fine tuning the suspension.
The MJA2 BH, entry-level product is not available with encryption. The biggest feature, perhaps, to the MJA2 CH, though, is full-disk hardware encryption, also featured in the previous generation. The drive will encrypt your data with 256 bit password-protected encryption with no performance loss, since it's all hardware.
Adoption of the previous generation's encrypted model was lukewarm, but Fujitsu says that government, military, and corporate interest in the drives is picking up. However, Mr. Jeanette notes, "Well into the majority of the segment will stay with the standard version."
Despite its unwillingness to jump into the flash market, Fujitsu continues to impress with its traditional hard drive offerings. With its new M250 lineup, it doesn't do anything revolutionary, but rather makes a number of incremental upgrades, lowering the power requirements, going halogen free, and upping the shock resistance.
Fujitsu is just getting warmed up according to Mr. Jeanette. He told DailyTech, "We're the first company that started shipping the SATA interface in the first quarter of 2004... We're in the lead, and we're just going to keep going."
The company is currently in talks with notebook manufacturers. While they could not reveal names, they say that we can expect to see the drives in laptops on the market late this quarter or in early Q1 2009.
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