Hitachi announced volume shipment of the industry’s highest-capacity, highest-performing notebook hard drive with new optional data encryption technology. Hard drive is doubled from 100GB to 200GB, and it spins at 7200 RPM's, unlike most of the 2.5 inch notebook HD's that end up at 5400 RPM's.

Dell and Alienware will be the first to offer Travelstar 7K200 on their notebook systems. They will offer "double the fun" with two of these on their Aurora m9700 and XPS M2010 notebooks.

Hitachi will also offer 7200 RPM performance in an enhanced-availability version. The Travelstar E7K200 is designed for applications that require 24x7 data access.

The Travelstar 7K200 uses 2 glass disk platters, with 4 recording heads. It has a 10ms read and 11m average write time, and 4.2 ms average latency. It uses 3Gb/s SATA interface. The Travelstar 7K200 will be available in retail this summer at a suggested retail price of $249.

You can check out more information on Hitachi.