Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has also jumped into the 500GB, two-platter, environmentally friendlier, 2.5-inch-wide mobile drive market.
The company has unveiled two new 500GB mobile hard drives that feature reduced 1.4-watt power consumption and halogen-free construction.
The Travelstar 5K500.B model is a standard notebook drive, while an "enhanced-availability" model, the Travelstar E5K500.B, is intended for blade servers, network routers and other 24x7 uses.
Another key feature of the Travelstar 5K500.B notebook drives is that they'll offer optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE). BDE encrypts the data using a private security key as it's written to the disk, then decrypts the data as it is retrieved.