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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.
