Fujitsu Delivers Serial ATA Laptop Drive

After being first unveiled in January 2004, Fujitsu's 2.5-inch Serial ATA hard drives are now ready to ship to computer makers and distributors, the company announced Thursday. The drives are among the smallest and fastest, boasting transfer rates of 150 Mbytes per second.

Serial ATA technology has seen rapid adoption in desktop PCs as a replacement to standard IDE due to its speed. The new 2.5-inch drives could bring the same throughput to notebook computers, where hard drives have become performance bottlenecks.

"For several years Fujitsu has been one of the primary forces driving the development, creation and adoption of mobile Serial ATA hard disk drive technology," said Joel Hagberg, Fujitsu's vice president of marketing.

"Volume delivery to OEMs and channel partners is a major milestone in that effort because it allows manufacturers, system integrators and distributors to create smaller and faster solutions."

Fujitsu's new drives feature Native Command Queuing that, according to the company, "coordinates up to 32 instructions to be queued and reordered by the hard disk controller, contributing to a significant improvement in overall performance."

Fujitsu has not yet announced pricing or specific availability of the 2.5-inch Serial ATA drives.