IBM's three sets of high-performance hard drives debut and show the giant's extraordinary strength

"Blue Giant" IBM recently launched three "heavyweight" hard drive products, which use IBM 's innovative technology, with unparalleled features and more powerful features in the industry, suitable for high-performance desktops, Laptops and the latest blade servers.

IBM 's new hard drive products include: The first group, the Deskstar 120GXP, the industry's lowest power 3.5-inch desktop hard drive . This hard drive has a capacity of 120GB and a speed of 7200 rpm. The enhanced Deskstar drives feature industry-leading hard drive technology for data-intensive multimedia applications that require the drive to have sufficient speed and power for peak performance.

The second group is the Travelstar 60GH and 40GN family products. With a capacity of 60GB and a rotational speed of 5,400 rpm, the Travelstar 60H is the industry's largest and most powerful 2.5-inch notebook hard drive. The 40GN series is available in 40GB, 30GB, 20GB and 10GB capacities with a speed of 4200 rpm. As a family of products, Travelstar guarantees the longest battery life in the leading notebook hard drive and maintains the reputation of the "quickest" hard drive in the industry. This product line uses IBM's hard disk noise suppression system.

Finally, IBM also introduced the new 2.5-inch Travelstar hard drive, which is more usable for non-traditional applications. IBM's first such drives increase the "run-time" of hard drives and are designed to meet the needs of emerging applications in the industry, such as the 24x7 blade server environment.

The two product families, Deskstar and Travelstar, are undisputed leaders in their respective fields. These hard drives are characterized by low power consumption, which underscores IBM's efforts to start low-power computing across the company. In addition, both families use IBM's unique anti-ferromagnetic coupling (AFC) media technology - nicknamed "Xian Chen." The magnetic properties of AFC media make the data stored on the hard disk more stable and the data density stored per unit area is higher – with the potential to double the industry's current per-area storage density.

Bill Healy, vice president of sales for IBM Storage Technologies, said, "We are constantly strengthening the next generation of Travelstar and Deskstar drives to support the low power, high capacity and miniaturization trends in today's electronics and pervasive computing markets. Capacity, performance, and other outstanding features demonstrate IBM's determination and strength to expand the limits of hard drive technology. Especially at this time, we are working hard to open up new markets such as consumer electronics, mobile storage and blade servers."

According to UC Berkeley's research, the world's annual output of new data is more than 1 billion GB, so the Deskstar 120GXP and Travelstar 60GH and 40GN product families will be key tools to help users fly freely in the new digital world.

Deskstar 120GXP
IBM's Deskstar series is the industry's leading high-capacity, high-performance desktop hard drive product, backed by IBM's quality and service. The three products in this family – with capacities of 120, 80 and 40GB respectively – are characterized by low noise, lowest power consumption and the strongest shock resistance in their class. The latest 120GXP continues and promotes the success of its pioneer 60GXP (60GXP was selected as "2001 Best Hard Drive of the Year" by Maximum PC Magazine).

The Deskstar 120GXP is designed to support advanced desktop and multimedia applications such as video editing, graphics, and other storage-intensive enterprise applications. With 120GB of storage capacity and 7,200 rpm, the 120GXP not only continues to focus on high performance, but also doubles its capacity and storage density per unit area compared to its predecessor, which allows users to be shorter. More data was retrieved in the time. The 7200 rpm speed makes Deskstar's read data faster, and this speed of hard drive is rapidly gaining popularity in the desktop market. The 120GXP is also the most rugged hard drive of its kind, with the strongest shock resistance.

The Deskstar 120GXP can store up to 120,000 paperback novels, 184 music CDs or 30 DVDs, which will be available to customers this month. IBM NetVista will begin using Deskstar 120GXP this year.

Travelstar 60GH and 40GN
In the mobile/laptop hard drive category, the IBM Travelstar hard drive family includes both 60GH and 40GN. The 60GH hard drive has a capacity of 15GB per disc and a maximum capacity of 60GB, which is 25% more than the capacity of its previous generation Travelstar hard drive, but the power consumption has not increased. The low power consumption of IBM's new Travelstar family of hard drives is achieved through its enhanced adaptive battery life extension (ABLE) technology.

These new developments, combined with advanced unit area storage density, noise suppression and operational vibration protection technology, provide users with the highest value in their class. In addition, Travelstar 60GH and 40GN provide users with value-for-money leading technology through the efficient use of components (heads and discs).

The new Travelstar hard drive has a maximum capacity of 60GB and can store up to 60,000 high-resolution images, 92 music CDs, more than 60,000 paperback novels or 15 DVDs. 60GH and 40GN are currently available to customers. IBM's award-winning ThinkPad notebooks will feature the latest Travelstar high-performance, high-capacity hard drive.

Travelstar - usability enhanced
The Travelstar 60GH and 40GN have outstanding capacity, performance and efficiency in their own right, both for traditional laptops and for non-traditional applications. However, IBM's new availability-enhanced Travelstar hard drive also has a longer "run-time", making this 2.5-inch hard drive ideal for emerging blade server environments such as web hosting and Internet data centers. These environments often require extremely high processing power in a small space. In addition, compact processing units such as blade servers require the system to dissipate as little heat as possible, which makes the 60 GHz and 40 GN low power consumption more suitable for this type of environment.

The newly available usability-enhanced Travelstar enables users to keep their hard drives running, and their read/write or data read speeds are up to 50% - a typical application for 24x7 blade servers. This new technology brings great promise to the future of IBM's future blade server products. The Travelstar 60GH and 40GN drives will be available in a variety of different capacities and will be available to customers at the end of the fourth quarter of this year.

Pat Collins, President and Chief Operating Officer of RLX Technologies, said: "As the industry's leading designer and producer of blade server products, we have found that Travelstar, which is already a leader in notebook products, is perfect for our System 324 ServerBlade. As we have customized, its key features such as size, power consumption, high capacity and uninterrupted performance make it far more useful than laptop hard drives."