Hot on the heels of my WD 320GB lappy drive review comes Hitachi’s announcement of their new 400 and 500GB 2.5″ SATA drives, the TravelStar 5K500. The drives will be available by the end of February, though no pricing details have been released. These drives are 2.5″ SATA types, run at 5400RPM, have drop protection, and a reasonable 12ms access time.

Hitachi, in conjunction with ASUS, also announced that ASUS is producing a dual drive laptop based on the 500GB model, making it the first 1TB laptop. Of course, since the 500GB model will likely only offer 480GB usable, it won’t really be a Terabyte lappy. Close enough for rock & roll, as we used to say!

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