Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) is planning capacity increases for its 2.5-inch hard-disk drives over the next 12 months, the company said Wednesday. In the first half of 2007, Hitachi plans to release a 2.5-inch hard disk drive offering 200-GB at 7200 RPM. The second Travelstar product, a 5400 RPM hard drive, will offer storage capacity in the quarter-terabyte range and is expected in the second half of 2007.

In addition, Hitachi is offering a flash memory/hard drive hybrid option for enhanced battery life, greater performance and increased reliability.

Both Travelstar drives will use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

Hitachi believes there is greater opportunity to increase the value of hard drives by storing some system functions to flash memory rather than on the disk. The potential benefit of a hybrid storage solution ? especially for mobile devices ? ranges from longer battery life, faster boot-up time and recovery from hibernation, to greater reliability and higher performance.

Combined with low-cost, high-capacity storage, the hybrid solution presents a significantly higher-value hard drive, especially in mobile product segments. New 2.5-inch products shipped in 2007 will offer hybrid as an option on the same base platform.

The new products will also provide hard-drive-level data encryption as a new feature for added security. A hard-drive-level encryption solution will scramble data using a password-generated key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved.

In hybrid hard drives, Hitachi employs the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, the industry standard for data encryption technology.

Hitachi's data encryption technology will be offered as a new feature on all new 2.5-inch hard drives shipped in 2007 and beyond.