The Endurastar J4K50 and N4K50 are Hitachi’s fourth-generation hard drives geared for automotive applications, such as navigation, digital entertainment (music/books/video), telematics and truly mobile computing. Featuring a wider temperature range and an industry-leading altitude range, the new Endurastar drives also incorporate leadership shock-absorption technologies to take on pot holes and other surface vibrations as far as a car can drive. The J4K50 and N4K50 feature the highest storage capacity in an automotive-class hard drive with a top capacity of 50 gigabytes (GB).

The Endurastar J4K50 offers an unsurpassed operating temperature range of -30 to +85 degrees Celsius (-22 to +185 degrees Fahrenheit), while the N4K50 sports a slightly lower range at -16 to +70 degrees Celsius (3 to 158 degrees Fahrenheit). This means the Hitachi Endurastar drives can operate at below freezing and near boiling temperatures. In terms of the road, the J4K50 would be able to travel from Antarctica, where the winter mean temperature is -30 degrees Celsius, to the Sahara Desert, where the hottest soil temperature could reach 80 degrees Celsius. The Endurastar products employ a technology called Thermal Fly-height Control to keep the read/write head at an appropriate distance from the surface of the disk as needed, which can be affected by extreme temperature variances.

In addition, an industry-leading altitude range of -300 to 5,000 meters allows the J4K50 to successfully store and retrieve data from the lowest point on earth, near the Dead Sea (-394 m), to the highest paved road in the world in the Andes Mountains (4,818 m). The N4K50 can travel to a slightly lower altitude with an upper range of 3,000 meters. To traverse hills, mountains and other bumpy terrain, Hitachi employs the following technologies to make the Endurastar products more rugged. The drives can survive as much as 3.0 G operating vibration and up to an 800 G drop shock.

Both the J4K50 and the N4K50 will be available in the first quarter of 2007, although there is still no information about the price…

– ? ??? ?•???‚? ?µ information about Hitachi’s Endurastar Harddrives…

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