Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) this week said it will ship a line of Serial ATA hard drives designed for notebook usage in Q4.

The drives will appear in time for laptop makers to incorporate them into machines based on 'Sonoma', the upcoming second generation of Intel's Centrino platform.

HGST's Travelstar 5K100 provides 100GB of storage in a 2.5in form-factor. Running at 5400rpm to help conserve power, the company also said it sees a role for the part in blade servers and other high-density storage rigs.

The company said it will also offer 40, 60 and 80GB models, and will make Parallel ATA versions available too, under the E5K100 brand.

HGST didn't refer to Sonoma by name, but its support for Serial ATA is a clear enabler for the company's new drives. Sonoma will bring together Intel's latest Wi-Fi adaptor, the 802.11a, b and g ProWireless 9215ABG, an upcoming version of its 90nm Pentium M CPU, 'Dothan', that supports a 533MHz frontside bus, and 'Alviso', a chipset that provides that bus speed, along with PCI Express, Serial ATA, Intel High-Definition Audio and Intel's Media Graphics Accelerator 900 technology. ®

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