Product Details:

IBM today announced the world's quietest family of mobile hard disk drives including the industry's highest capacity notebook drive. With reduced noise levels, faster speeds and higher performance, IBM's new Travelstar family provides the optimal storage solution for data, music, video, digital photo and streaming media.

Incorporating IBM's Drive Noise Suppression System (DNSS) across its entire product line, the new Travelstar drives offer significantly reduced noise levels that enhance the user's experience while enjoying music and video on the notebook computers. DNSS replaces the traditional ball bearing design with the fluid dynamic bearing spindle motor technology and voice coil motor dampening enhancements. These efforts result in acoustical noise reduction, improved shock tolerance and superior reliability.

Featuring the industry's highest capacity notebook drive at 48 GB, the Travelstar 48GH, allows individuals to store 48,000 high-resolution photographs, 74 musical CDs, 48,000 paperback novels or 12 DVD movies.* The Travelstar 48GH stores five times as much data as today's average notebook hard drive and 50 percent more than IBM's previous largest mobile drive, the Travelstar 32GH, the industry's current capacity leader.

While most mobile drives spin at 4,200 rotations per minute (rpm), the Travelstar 48GH spins at 5,400 rpm, making it the fastest mobile hard disk drive on the market. Additionally, with media transfer rates up to 241 megabits per second (Mbits/sec), the Travelstar 48GH combines spindle speed and improved processing speed to boost its overall performance. The new drives also are more power efficient, increasing capacity and speed while maintaining the energy requirements of the previous product generation.

Features:

Fluid Dynamic Bearing Spindle Motors:
A new technology that improves drive reliability while minimizing accoustic noise, and Non Repeatable Runount (NRRO)--the highest contributor to track mis-registration and track following (which impact performance).

Glass disk platters:
IBM is now using glass substrates in some of its industry-leading disk drives. The glass substrate disks are much stiffer and more robust than traditional disks. As a result, the glass substrate disks can provide higher capacities, better reliability, improved data integrity, and longer disk lifetime-giving end users a more cost-effective disk drive.

IBM giant magnetoresistive (GMR) head technology:
GMR Heads enable higher areal densities, which means more data can be stored on each disk resulting in lower costs. The 20GN's areal densities reach 17.1 billion bits per square inch, with a per disk capacity of 10 GB.

Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML):
Advantages of PRML include faster data transfer rates, fewer soft errors per MB stored, and filtering of the signal from the disk, which results in a 'clean' signal. It all boils down to greater reliability for your data.

Load/unload technology:
IBM is incorporating load/unload technology into its new disk drive products as a way to increase drive durability and capacity while reducing overall storage costs.

Enhanced Adaptive Battery Life Extender (ABLE) 3.0:
When the disk drive is idle, this unique power-management technology dynamically selects the appropriate mode to minimize power usage and help preserve battery life. The mode selection is based on the current disk drive access patterns, so disk response times can also improve significantly.

Specifications:

Capacity up to 48 GB
Rotational Speed 5400 RPM
Interface ATA-5 (ATA/100)
Average seek time 12.0 ms