HGST begins shipping Endurastar J4K320, a new HDD for Automotives

Some of our readers may be shocked to hear that the car they drove to work this morning may have a hard drive under the dash. With today's vehicles featuring more and more technology, we have to have somewhere to store all that data, and HGST has been leading the way for years now.

Earlier this week, HGST announced that it has began shipping the sixth generation of its automotive friendly HDDs. The new Endurastar J4K320 line of hard drives feature a single platter design that has been refined for the automotive infotainment and telematics market. With capacities up to 320GB, the new Endurastar drives are built to survive the rugged environment that automobiles not only reside in, but also create.

The hard drives have to be able to withstand extreme temperatures with very fast fluctuations between hot and cold, while at the same time retaining enough rigidity to handle the stray pothole or speed bump the vehicle may encounter. The Endurastar hard drives can handle altitudes up to 18,000 feet, and can operate in temperatures from -22F all the way up to 185F. Shock loads up to 300Gs will not phase the drive either.

"For many years, Mitsubishi Electric has turned to HGST Endurastar automotive HDD drives to meet the needs of car multimedia systems," said Hiroyuki Morikane, GM, Sanda Works of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. "From the very first automotive grade models through the current Endurastar J4K320 series, HGST HDDs have met our requirements for excellent performance and high reliability. Mitsubishi Electric looks forward to qualifying HGST's new J4K320 automotive drive as we believe it is the ideal solution for OEM automotive customers who require high capacity and superior quality in a storage device. Backed by HGST's attention to quality, cost, flexible delivery and customer support, we expect the J4K320 to become the next chapter in our long history of a strong business partnership."

"HGST has been working with the automotive industry for nearly two decades to develop the right HDD products for use in cars," said Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing, HGST. "These onboard systems integrate a combination of entertainment (video, audio, radio), navigation, connectivity, security services, diagnosis and much more to help provide a seamless in-car user experience. The combination of these services, especially navigation, requires reliable and durable storage for the supporting application software, as well as the needed capacity to store end-user content. As our sixth generation automotive drive, our new Endurastar J4K320 drive family continues to deliver on the needed requirements, and provides long-term data stability and reliability for the automotive market."

The Endurastar J4K320 family comes in 320GB, 250GB, 200GB, 100GB and 80GB capacities, operates at 4,260rpm and features a SATA interface for design configuration flexibility. The drive family is based on a standard 9.5mm 2.5-inch form factor for integration into many new and traditional system designs. This allows OEMs and system integrators to take advantage of its ruggedness, capacity, low power idle and low-rpm performance for the automotive markets.