Hitachi's hard drive division today outlined its strategy for the next year, pushing encryption and flash memory hybrids at notebooks. It'll be increasing capacity on its cash cow 2.5-inch notebook drives too. A 2.5in 7,200rpm effort will lead the charge in the first half of next year with 200GB of storage. Later in the year a 5,400rpm drive will push notebook capacity up to quarter of a terabyte.

Over on desktop, Hitachi will rock up with a 1TB drive in 2007.

The encrytion and flash hybrid drives signal the hard drive market's move towards adding value to the hard drive component from the user's perspective.

Main rival Seagate has its own offerings in these areas too, though the industry is of course keen to rubbish talk of the beginning of the end for magnetic drives. Hitachi reckons hybrid drives will find most traction in the mobile market.

Encryption might be a tougher sell, especially once Vista ships with its own software-based full disk encryption thrown in.

More from Hitachi here. ®