As we all know, laptop sales are going slowly up, and the market share of portable computers recently surpassed that of the desktop computers. Obviously, this tendency is not going to fade, and so hardware for portable computers gets faster and cheaper with each day...or bigger, when we talk about internal storage.


Today, we're going to note that Fujitsu just announced its first 500 GB hard drive for laptops, making it the third producer to join the "500 club", when talking about drives for laptops, because those for desktop computers have reached 1TB already...

Following Hitachi and Samsung, Fujitsu announced a 500GB capacity becoming available for portable computers, with the help of a three-platter design. The 500GB drive from Fujitsu uses 3 platters with a 170GB capacity each, and is 12.5 millimeters thick because of that (most laptop drives are 9.5 millimeters thick).

The new 2.5-inch 500GB Fujitsu drive will use the SATA interface and only 4,200 rpm, with announced seek/write times of 12/14 milliseconds. Pricing was not announced yet, since the drive will arrive in stores in May, so there's still a pretty long wait until then...