$US400 for a 2.5-inch notebook drive is going to be felt in your wallet. I must admit it is nice to see notebook hard drives catching desktop drives. Maybe one day, the 3.5-inch drive will be discontinued just like the older harder drives (5.25-inch anyone?).
Hitachi have shown off their Travelstar 5K500, which at 500GB is very impressive. It isn’t due to an advance in HDD technology though. This drive cheated and simply added another platter on top of the other platters. It does make the drive sit 3mm higher then the other current competitors (9.5mm), but keeps inside the industry standard for 2.5-inch drives. With that said do expect it to fit in most current notebooks or portable HDD cases.
Hitachi’s new drive will be available in February, and is already scheduled to be inside of the upcoming Asus M50 and M70 notebooks in dual configuration (that’s 1TB in a portable computer). There will also be a enterprise version created for blades and very small server, titled the E5k500.

For more info, click over to the Engadget Blog.