Fujitsu enters the half-terabyte HDD fray

Fujitsu is now the third company to have announced a half terabyte 2.5" drive by announcing its MHZ2 BT.

Fujitsu's reputation for HDD production has a few historical black marks. In 2001-2002, over 300,000 of its PB16 family of drives had to be recalled and replaced due to severe overheating. This resulted in a $43 million class action lawsuit settled in 2004. Furthermore, the company's Lifebook N3010 reportedly tended to run on the extremely hot side (October 2006 Sony battery issue notwithstanding).

This 2.5" 500 GB 4200 RPM SATA HDD is the fourth-generation high capacity 4200 RPM SATA drive to come from Fujitsu. Read/Write time is expected to be 12/14 milliseconds on average, with 1.5 millisecond track-to-track seek time.

The device has been certified best in class for power consumption, typically demanding 1.8 Watts for read and write operations, 0.5W of power is consumed during idle time, and only 0.13W is typically required power to maintain standby and sleep modes.

Due to the drive's 12.5mm height profile, it may not be able to fit into all laptop drive bays. This condition is shared by Hitachi's TravelStar 5K500 half-terabyte 2.5" drive, which it debuted at MacWorld this year.

Of the three 500 GB to be out soon, Fujitsu's is also the only one that spins at 4200 RPM. Samsung's Spinpoint M6, which it showed at CES 2008, is only 9.5" high and spins at 5400 RPM, and Hitachi's drive utilizes that speed as well. Furthermore, companies like Western Digital and Toshiba offer 320 GB 2.5" drives at that speed.

Fujitsu expects its MHZ2 BT to ship this month, as does Hitachi with its TravelStar 5K500. Samsung's Spinpoint M6 is due in March.

While this consumer product looks to be "fat and slow," Fujitsu seems to be compensating in the private sector. The company recently announced it had been contracted to produce a massively parallel supercomputer for Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, based on 3,392 of its FX1 technical computing servers. Peak theoretical performance of this system is 135 teraflops.