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HGST launches new CinemaStar drives for media PCs and set top boxes
What's 2.5-inches wide, 7mm tall and silent as a whisper? Well, hopefully it's HGST's new CinemaStar hard drives. We know for certain that these platters of polarized bits will fit in your standard 2.5-inch drive bay, we'll just have to take this Western Digital subsidiary at its word (for now) on the silent bit. Three new families of disks just hit the market, the Z7K500, Z5K500 and budget-friendly C5K1000. The first two options are 7mm high, allowing them to slide nicely into small form factor PCs, DVRs and even laptops. Both top out at 500GB, but the Z7K ekes out better performance by whipping its platters around at 7,200 RPM, while the Z5Ks save energy and noise by ratcheting back to 5,400 RPM. The C5K comes in a slightly bulkier 9.5mm height, but this 5,400 RPM drive does reach the lofty storage size of 1TB. For now the drives are available in limited quantities to OEMs, but hopefully that will change soon enough. Check out the PR after the break for more details.
Hitachi Deskstar and CinemaStar drives dish up 1TB on a single platter
No self-respecting drive head wants to travel further than is strictly necessary to fetch that bloody MP3 you just clicked. That's why Hitachi's effort to cram 1TB onto a single platter with a cosy 569 gigabits per square inch makes a lot of sense: it reduces the distance between chunks of data, thereby improving the HDD's sequential transfer rates while also lowering its calorie consumption. You'll find these ultra-dense discs in the new 1TB Deskstar 7k1000.D and 5k1000.B models, which started shipping today, as well as in the CinemaStar range coming later this fall. Sure, Seagate got there first, but we'll happily overlook that fact as soon as Hitachi decides to serve up a five-platter 5TB whopper to go with our lettuce. Full specs in the PR after the break.
Hitachi GST releases CinemaStar hard drives aimed for a DVR near you
Hitachi GST has announced two new drive families that it hopes will find happy homes in living rooms soon. To survive the mean streets of entertainment, both the 2.5-inch CinemaStar C5K750 and the 3.5-inch CinemaStar C5K750 families are lauded as quiet, energy sipping, and compact -- though they're positively fat compared to their 7mm thick Travelstar brethren. The 2.5-inch line ships in capacities of 750, 640, and 500GBs, while sipping 1.5W power during read/write operation and generating 2.3 idle bels. The 3.5-inch family bumps up the storage up to 1.5TB and 2TB capacities and features a CoolSpin Technology for A/V performance when handling the onslaught of recording and playing multiple video streams. For full details check out the PR after the break.
Hitachi stuffs 320GB into world's fastest 7mm hard drive
Well look at that: it's the world's first 320GB hard disk drive to spin at 7,200 RPM in a 7-mm high package -- take that Seagate. The 2.5-inch Serial ATA 3Gbps Travelstar Z7K320 features a 1,334Mbps max transfer rate assisted by a 16MB cache. The HDD draws 1.8 watts during read/write operations and 0.8 watts on lower-power idle while humming along at 23dB when idle or 24dB when seeking. And that skinny 7-mm form factor means it'll go places no standard 9.5-mm thick drive could even dream of when it hits the mass production lines in August -- like say next generation ultra-thin netbooks.
Hitachi shows off pair of new CinemaStar hard drives
Just after Hitachi President Kazuo Furukawa announced that the company is digging in with its flat panel and hard drive business lines, two new CinemaStar hard drives get a June release date. First up is the 2.5-inch, 320GB CinemaStar C5K320, with SmoothStream to keep your video flowing, um, smoothly. If you need more capacity, there's the 3.5-inch, 500GB CinemaStar 5K500 (not to be confused with the 2.5-inch TravelStar 5K500), which is Hitachi's first drive with CoolSpin to limit current draw. We've never had a problem putting standard desktop hard drives to multimedia use, but limiting heat/power draw and acoustic noise are two area that you should factor in for drives destined for living room or bedroom placement; so if poring over specs like bels and Watts isn't your thing, maybe consider an "approved" video drive like these.
Hitachi develops AVSM software to make DVR hard drives "smarter"
It's one thing when the most taxing task your DVR will ever face is the furious fast-forwarding necessary to get the next scene in your favorite recorded drama, but if you've got over 100 hours of HD VOD to churn through while recording tonight's game and sifting through next week's programming list, having a more intelligent hard drive just might help out. In an effort to reduce DVR hard drive fragmentation, lengthen the life of set-top boxes, improve the quality of service / speed to the end user, and give your average DVR the ability to "manage up to 14 HDTV (19.3Mbps) streams from a single 3.5-inch HDD," Hitachi has developed AVSM technology to help your DVR's HDD think things through before going through the motions. The background software differentiates between "streaming applications and best-effort, non-real-time applications" such as electronic program guides, IPTV downloads, and photo browsing in order to manage the line of tasks more efficiently. Overall, the software reportedly reduces duty cycles "by up to 60 percent" and all but eliminates disc fragmentation, but realistically, with new units popping up entirely more frequently than your average hard drive takes to perish, hooking DVRs up with all these smarts might be a bit unnecessary for those who stay on the bleeding edge.
Hitachi breaks 1TB hard drive barrier with 7K1000
Well, we knew it was likely to happen in 2006 or 2007: Hitachi has fulfilled their promise and broken the 1TB drive barrier with the introduction of Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K1000 drive. Thanks to perpendicular recording and the average consumers' voracious appetite for porn totally legitimate data, Hitachi's new $400 drives -- available in SATA II or PATA 133 varieties, with differing speed modes, a 32MB buffer, quieting accoustics, SMART, and a 7200rpm spindle speed -- will hit the market running in Q1 of this year. Also announced: the CinemaStar 7K1000, a DVR-centric drive due in Q2 which wasn't fully detailed, but apparently has "adaptive error recovery", "Smooth Stream Technology to optimize the drive for audio/video applications requiring reliable storage", and other buzzy sounding stuff which just seems a lot like regular old drive features. We'll assume it's better tuned for high-throughput read / write performance, and leave it at that.
