Hitachi
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Hitachi's 7mm-thick hard drives grow to 500GB, keep slimline profile
If you can't beat SSDs (and you can't, we've checked), you might as well try and dress like them by squeezing into the unreasonably low profile of just 7mm. Such must be the reasoning behind Hitachi's svelte 7mm-thick HDD series, which today gets augmented with a new top-of-the-line drive boasting 500GB of storage room. This single-platter archivist measure 2.5 inches diagonally, but as its Z5K500 product name suggests, it only spins at the tame rate of 5400RPM. The less generously proportioned Z7K320 offers 7200RPM if you're after more oomph, but it's most likely that your first real contact with either of these drives will be when you see them built into whatever larger device you're buying. Like, say, an ultrathin netbook or a PMP that's eager to swallow your music collection whole.
Hitachi ships Deskstar 7K3000 and 5K3000 HDDs, 3TB XL external drive
Three. It's a magical number, you know? Hitachi GST sure feels that way, and the company is today introducing a trio of three terabyte storage solutions. First up is the 3TB Deskstar internal HDD kit, which apparently shatters the 2.2TB capacity limit on 32-bit Windows XP systems without any extra hardware required. For those who've graduated to more modern systems, there's the new 3TB Hitachi XL USB 2.0, an external archive solution designed to be sat horizontally or vertically and operate with both PC and Mac platforms. Lastly, the company is finally shipping the 7K3000 and 5K3000 internal hard drives to OEMs and channel partners, but the 3TB version of the latter won't hit until next quarter. As for pricing? All's quiet on the western front... save for that XL, anyway -- that one's going for $249.99 (3TB), $169.99 (2TB) and $99.99 (1TB).
Hitachi debuts 7,200RPM 3TB Deskstar 7K3000 hard drive
Hitachi was the first to roll out a 7,200RPM, 3.5-inch 2TB hard drive, and it looks like it's now done it again at the 3TB level. That comes in the form of the company's new Deskstar 7K3000 model, which appears to not only be the first 7,200RPM 3TB drive hard around, but Hitachi's first drive with a 6Gbps SATA interface. Otherwise, the five-platter drive packs a 64MB cache buffer, an idle power draw of 6.8W, and what Hitachi describes as an eco-friendly, halogen-free design. Still no word on pricing or a release date, but The Inquirer surmises it'll cost somewhere in the neighborhood of £200, or $320.
Hitachi displays a capacitive screen capable of accepting stylus input (video)
Can someone ring up Lucifer and check that his heating's still working? Hitachi has achieved the unthinkable in bringing together the high precision and input flexibility of resistive touchscreens with the finger friendliness of capacitive panels. It's graced this year's FPD trade show with a new prototype that offers the capacitive functionality we're all used to by now, augmented with the ability to recognize input from a stylus or, perhaps more importantly, gloved hands. We're sure we can hear the sound of cheering coming from the chilly shores of Scandinavia right now. If all goes well, Hitachi should be able to bring them (and you, and the rest of the world) this finger-saving innovation at some point in late 2011, after production gets going in the second half of that year. Video demonstration after the break.
Hitachi GST's G-Drive Slim: world's thinnest 2.5-inch external hard drive
Not like we need our 2.5-inch external drives to get that much smaller, but who are we to kvetch about progress? Hitachi GST has just outed what it calls the thinnest 2.5-inch external hard drive in the world. The G-Drive Slim is encased in a 128.6- x 82- x 9.9mm aluminum enclosure, and tucked within is a slimmer-than-usual 7mm Travelstar Z5K320 hard drive. The USB-powered unit comes formatted for use with Macs, but a quick reformat on your Windows machine will have its mind changed in no time flat. For now, it's only available in a 320GB flavor for $99.99, and you'll only find it at your local Apple Store.
Hitachi ships 10K RPM, 6Gbps Ultrastar C10K600 2.5-inch hard drive
Hate to point out the obvious, but that little critter you see above is fast. Like, record-breaking fast. Hitachi GST just announced that it'll begin shipping this bantam speed demon today, offering enterprise customers a 2.5-inch HDD that spins at 10,000RPM and operates on a 6Gb/s SCSI SAS platform. The Ultrastar C10K600 is available in 300GB, 450GB and 600GB flavors, and Hitachi claims that it can deliver "up to 15 percent better random and 18 percent faster sequential performance than competitive products on the market today." Furthermore, these eat up some 65 percent less power than the company's 3.5-inch enterprise drives, and also boast average seek times as low as 3.7 milliseconds. Mum's the word on pricing, but chances are you won't actually want to know; the full release is after the break.
Hitachi-LG unveils 2nd generation hybrid optical drive with flash-based storage to boot
The Hitachi-LG Data Storage joint venture has itself fostered yet another mixed product, combining both an optical disk drive and flash storage into a single form factor. The 2nd generation of its Hybrid Drive uses Micron's 25nm NAND flash memory in 16GB, 32GB, 64GB capacities (with those figures to rise in later iterations, naturally) and can be united with either DVD or Blu-ray players -- perfect for laptops and other portable devices with just one drive to spare. (The one stretched out on display, pictured above, was a 12.7mm slim DVD-RW tray type). Hitachi housed samples of the drive at its CEATEC booth and even showed off a few example products (first generation drive, too). Care to see what could be under the hood of a future purchase? Pictures below. %Gallery-104372%
Hitachi's 6.6-inch / 302ppi IPS panel gets eyes-on treatment, locks eyes with iPhone 4's retina display
Perhaps our eyes are just too untrained for such tasks, but we didn't much miss the 24ppi or so difference between the iPhone 4's retina display (326 ppi) and Hitachi's 6.6-inch IPS panel (302 ppi). The CEATEC prototype panel is just gorgeous and crystal clear (as much as Shakespeare and Kanji-laden articles can be, at least). Unfortunately, we couldn't find anyone to answer our questions as to when it might hit mass production, so for now, just enjoy the view. %Gallery-104498%
Hitachi's 6.6-inch IPS tablet display with amazing 302 ppi
What you're looking at is not just another display. This little beauty throws 1600 x 1200 pixels across a 6.6-inch transmissive IPS panel for an amazing 302 pixels per inch density. That's just shy of the 326 ppi density seen on Apple's 3.5-inch Retina Display (and now Sharp IS03) and blows away the 132 ppi density of the iPad's 10-inch 1024 x 768 IPS panel or 169 ppi density of the 7-inch 1024 x 600 pixel Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry PlayBook. Even at that size, the panel still manages an 800:1 contrast ratio and 400 nits of brightness. Unfortunately, we don't have any word on when we can expect these to ship in volume, though we wouldn't mind seeing it show up in Apple's rumored 7-inch iPad -- anywhere, really. P.S. To fuel speculation, this Hitachi panel shares the same 4:3 aspect ratio as Apple's iPad. Just sayin'.
Hitachi intros Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 mobile hard drives: 750GB at 9.5mm
It's a common story, really. Your puny 120GB mobile hard drive has been overflowing for months, and you've been waiting for what feels like an eternity for an affordable, capacious SSD. It's about time to give up the fantasy and get real, and thankfully Hitachi GST is making said pill a touch easier to swallow. The company's new Travelstar 5K750 (5400RPM; 8MB buffer) and 7K750 (7200RPM; 16MB buffer) have been announced this morning, and they're the company's first to feature Advanced Format. In other news, they're also the industry's largest drives in a standard-height form factor, cramming up to 750GB (375GB per platter) into a conventional 9.5mm shell that'll slip into just about any laptop made in the last decade. Yeah, WD managed to stuff 1TB into a laptop drive earlier in the year, but you'll need a machine that's beefy enough to handle a 12mm height drive in order to take advantage. At any rate, the drives will also be available in 500GB and 640GB sizes for those who can't handle three-quarters of a terabyte, and while the 5K750 family is already shipping in volume with a starting tag of $129.99, the speedier 7K750 crew won't be out until Q1 2011.
Hitachi shows off new gesture-based interface, touts grand plans
Hitachi's already dipped its toes (or hands, as it were) into the gesture-based waters before, but it looks to have refined things quite a bit for its latest Minority Report-esque demo, which the company is showing off as part of its 100th anniversary celebration. While complete details are a bit light, the system does seem to be reasonably responsive, and appears to rely on a projection-based system and a single camera to track movements. Perhaps what's most interesting, however, is that Hitachi eventually sees systems like this being used in everything from digital signage to medical applications -- and, yes, even TVs and desktop computers (though not before mid-2011 at the earliest). Head on past the break to check it out in action.
Hitachi 'Life Microscope' promises to track your every movement
Sure, there's plenty of devices like the Fitbit that can track your movement and report on your general level of activity or laziness, but only Hitachi has what it's dubbed a "Life Microscope." That name apparently comes from the fact that the device is able to track your activity with more detail than other fitness monitors -- including, it seems, the difference between sitting and sleeping, and even the difference between eating or playing video games. That data is then naturally able to be transferred to a PC, and it also sounds like the Life Microscope could be incorporated into actual watches as well -- if it ever moves beyond the concept stage, that is.
Hitachi unveils LifeStudio content-aware external hard drives, we go hands-on
If we said Hitachi's got a new line of external hard drives, you'd probably walk away -- but what if they were the smartest bricks of magnetic memory you'd ever seen? That's how Hitachi is billing the new LifeStudio array of drives, which feature not only the standard rotating disks, but also dockable USB keys, software that auto-organizes your media, and several gigabytes of cloud storage. At $80 for a basic 250GB 2.5-inch disk and $220 for the premium 2TB desktop unit, they're not the cheapest external storage on the block, but they claim to do so much more than store that we just had to give them a try. Read our full impressions after the break. %Gallery-97047%
Hitachi working on cheaper, higher quality IPS touchscreens for cellphones
In case you haven't heard, IPS panels are making inroads into the lucrative mobile market this year, and Hitachi's been working behind the scenes on something that should keep that momentum going. In the mainstream, touchscreen IPS displays are currently only available on Apple's iPad (and expected to show up in its next-gen iPhone), but should Hitachi's new production technique pan out, we might be seeing this screen tech in much more affordable devices as well. The company has fiddled with the arrangement of the touchscreen elements inside the panel, which it argues has made them cheaper and easier to produce and replace. All good news, but these things do take a while to filter through into reality, until which time you might wanna sate yourself with the latest desktop IPS displays, those ain't too shabby or expensive either.
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-LG goes official with HyDrive: SSD-equipped optical drives landing in August
Hitachi-LG outed most of the major details for its forthcoming HyDrive last week, but the company just officially took the wraps off the world's first SSD-equipped laptop optical drive. Frankly, it's sort of astounding it took this long for such an obvious idea to come to fruition, but now that we're here, we fully expect other outfits to follow suit. Put simply, the HyDrive is a standard form factor optical drive (DVD burner or Blu-ray will be available), but there's a 32GB or 64GB SSD (not just a strip of NAND, we're told) tucked below. When this gets stuffed within a laptop, you're immediately able to access an optical drive, an SSD (for your operating system and critical launch applications) and a spacious HDD for storing music, media, etc. Previously, this type of three-drive arrangement was only available in beastly Clevo's and the like, but this solution is obviously tailor made for even ODD-equipped ultraportables. Another plus to the HyDrive is the integrated Defect Management technology, which essentially caches information from scratched discs (DVDs, namely) in order to play the content back sans jitters. More after the break... %Gallery-93932%
Hitachi-LG teases HyDrive: an optical reader with loads of NAND (video)
Want a speedy, drop-proof SSD in your laptop? In all but the largest of 'em, you've got just two choices: pay through the nose for a reasonable amount of storage, or settle for a cheaper boot drive at the expense of capacity. Hitachi-LG Data Storage is pulling a Monty Hall by opening door number three -- an optical drive with a built-in 32GB or 64GB SSD. Dubbed the HyDrive and currently being showcased at mysterydrive.net, the product is presently being labeled a "concept," but a set of impressive demo videos already show the ODD / SSD combo booting, multitasking and error-correcting Keanu Reeves like a trained pro. We'll have more details at Computex, at which point we'll let you know whether to be hesitantly expectant or gravely disappointed. Personally, hybrid HDDs be damned -- we want one of these suckers yesterday. Videos after the break.
Japanese gurus unveil 50TB magnetic tape cartridges, are officially 'taking it way back'
It's comical, really -- we can't get a decently powerful Atom to save our lives, but the absolutely thrilling world of magnetic tape storage is bounding ahead at a record pace. Priorities, people. For the archivists and A-type pack rats in the crowd, you'll probably be atypically elated to know that Hitachi Maxell and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have teamed up in order to develop the world's most capacious tape cartridges. Back in January, IBM and Fujifilm celebrated a momentary victory by announcing a 35TB version of this same product, but this record shattering attempt takes areal density to spaces never before ventured into in order to hit the magical 50TB mark. 'Course, you'll probably never see one outside of your state's largest library, but at least that 3TB HDD you're drooling over for your next PC seems so much more bodacious now. Oh, wait.
Japan plans mind-reading robots and brain interface devices 'by 2020'
Our grandparents did warn us that laziness would get us in trouble. The Japanese government and private sector are, according to the Nikkei, all set to begin work on a collaborative new project to develop thought-controlled gadgets, devices ... and robots. The aim is to produce brain-to-computer interfaces that would allow the ability to change channels or pump out texts just with your almighty brain power, while also facilitating artificial intelligence that would be capable of detecting when you're hungry, cold, or in need of assistance. Manufacturing giants Toyota, Honda and Hitachi get name-dropped as potential participants in this 10-year plan, though we wonder if any of them will have the sense to ask what happens when an ultra-precise and emotionless bot is given both intelligence and mind-reading powers. Would it really stick to dunking biscuits in our tea, or would it prefer something a little more exciting?
Hitachi 3.1-inch 3D IPS display is another Nintendo 3DS contender
Step aside Sharp, Hitachi has a parallax barrier 3D display all its own that likewise doesn't require special glasses to view. While not as bright (400nits vs. 500nits) or big as Sharp's 3.4-incher, Hitachi's contribution brings a 3.1-inch IPS panel to mobile 3D devices pushing the same 480 x 854 pixels and 1,000:1 reported contrast. While the image above won't make much sense outside of Japan, here's the gist: a series of vertical slits in the IPS LCD directs light to the right and left eyes to give the 3D effect -- no special glasses required. Remember, both Hitachi and Sharp have a long, and sometimes dubious, relationship with Nintendo so don't be surprised to see either (or both) announced as partners when Ninty unveils its 3DS handheld console at E3 in June.
