LAPTOP HARD DRIVES have been playing catch up with their desktop cousins for some time but an announcement from Hitachi today sees the gap narrowing between the 3.5 inch drives normally found in big boxen and the diminutive 2.5 incher in your laptop.

The Japanese electronics giant's new Travelstar 7K range has platters which spin at a nippy 7,200 rpm whereas most current 2.5 inch drives wheeze away at 5,400 rpm. And at a maximum of 320GB, the capacity is pretty impressive too.

Hitachi reckons the drives improve application performance by 12 per cent whilst reducing power consumption by 22 per cent and still remain quiet enough to make watching movies on your lappy a pleasurable experience.

Hitachi is staying tight-lipped about which box builders will be using the new drives in production models, but you should be able to get hold of a retail version in the next week or so for around £110.

Here are some more numbers for you to drool over. µ

Travelstar 7K320

320/250/160/120/80GB
9.5mm in height
7,200 RPM
252 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
2/2/1/1/1 glass disks
4/4/2/2/1 TMR recording head(s)
1000G/1ms non-operating shock
400G/2ms operating shock
4.2ms average latency
12ms average read time
1.0W active idle
0.8W low-power idle
Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 1.5Gb/s encrypted
115/110 grams in weight
2.5Bels typical idle acoustics
2.8Bels typical operational acoustics