Hitachi announced today that it is now shipping its TravelStar 7K320 2.5-inch notebook HDD. The drive has 320GB of storage space without sacrificing the faster 7200 RMP rotational speed. Hitachi says that the new drive delivers 60% higher capacity than the drive before it and application performance is improved by 12%.

A version of the drive will also be offered with bulk data encryption as well. The standard version of the drive will use a SATA 3GB/s interface and the BDE version will use the SATA 1.5GB/s interface. Power utilization is on par with 5400 RPM drives.

The drive requires 1W when active, 0.8W when idle and can withstand 1000G of non-operating shock and 400G when operating. The average latency of the drive is 4.1ms and the average read time is 12ms. The standard version of the drive is shipping now and the BDE version is expected to ship in Q3 2008.

Via Hitachi