Fujitsu and Hitachi on Tuesday introduced notebook hard-disk drives that use less power than previous generations and are friendlier to the environment.

The drives are in the 2.5-inch form factor favored by mobile PC manufacturers, have maximum capacities of 500 GB, and run at 5,400 revolutions per minute. Fujitsu's latest models are the MJA2 BH and the MJA2 CH, which includes disk-level data encryption. Hitachi's latest mobile HDDs include the Travelstar 5K500.B and E5K500.B. The latter is designed for applications running 24 hours in low-transaction environments, such as blade servers, network routers, point-of-sale terminals, and video-surveillance systems.

All the drives are halogen-free, which means fewer hazardous materials are used in their production. In addition, the drives have a read/write power consumption of 1.4 watts at 500-GB capacities. In the case of Fujitsu, that's 33% less power than previous generations. The drives also have 3 Gbps SATA interfaces.

For encryption, the Fujitsu MJA2 CH supports the Advanced Encryption Standard adopted by the U.S. government. The Hitachi drives are available with optional data encryption that will meet the forthcoming Storage Security specification established by the Trusted Computing Group, an industry group started by Advanced Micro Devices, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.

The Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B will be available in capacities ranging from 120 GB to 500 GB, and is scheduled to ship worldwide in December. The E5K500.B is scheduled to be available by the end of the first quarter of next year.

The Fujitsu drives are scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 2009. Fujitsu and Hitachi did not release pricing.