Got this reply from a Hitachi SENIOR technical rep this morning. Thought you guys might like to see their reply:
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Reading through your case materials I can ascertain that there is some confusion regarding power management using the E7K60 drive products.
First, the E7K60 products have all APM features disabled. I would not recommend using them is a laptop environment where battery usage is a major consideration. You cannot 'enable' any APM features using the Hitachi Feature tool.
The heat environmental characteristic specification differ because the E7K60 is meant to run in a blade server environment and has to be cooled because of the 24x7 operating environment of these systems. The spec actually refers to the operating environment, which should provide sufficient airflow to keep the drive within its operating parameters.
Without sufficient airflow the drive will exceed these temperatures and if continually operated as such will probably fail. Blade servers typically don't use any power management features because of the high availability, high usage, operating requirements of such a system.
Finally, you cannot "flash" the firmware on the E7K60 to make it into a 7K60 as there are hardware differences between the two product lines. The firmware has different servo curves to accommodate for the physical differences (amongst other changes). Attempting to do so would render the drive useless (and void its warranty)."
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Granted, the point is moot for me since ordered the (non-E)7K60 from Dell already. BTW, if you go to
http://www.dell.com/dellf, you can play for their coupons, one of which is a 20% off storage products. It works on the (non-E)7K60 drive, bringing it down to $139 and some change (+ tax in some states) with free shipping.
