Hitachi Gives a Nod to the Movie Watcher

With an acknowledgement to the home theater enthusiast, Hitachi announced a new line of drives, with variable rotational speed, similar to the Western Digital Green series of drives. This allows the noise of the drive to be modulated, which allows for very quiet performance in things like PVRs and DVRs, which seem to be almost ubiquitous these days.

from TechConnect

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has now revealed two more CinemaStar families of hard drives which are aimed for use within HD DVRs, DVD/HDD recorders, DVR-enabled TVs, media centers, and video surveillance systems. Both coming in a 3.5-inch form factor, the CinemaStar 7K1000.C and CinemaStar 5K1000 drives go from 160GB to 1TB and feature a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, a working speed of 7200 RPM, a MTBF of 1.2 million hours, and the SmoothStream technology which enables them to perform optimally in AV applications.

The CinemaStar 5K1000 models also make use of the CoolSpin technology which does motor speed optimizations so as to deliver a lower sound output and cut power consumption while maintaining performance at decent levels. As a result of CoolSpin, the 5K1000 drives have a sound output of 2.4 bels during operation.

“With the market for hard drive-enabled DVRs and PVRs growing at a significant rate, we are experiencing increasing demand for our CinemaStar products,” said Brendan Collins, Vice President of Marketing, Hitachi GST. “The new crop of HDTVs with built-in DVRs is one example of what’s fueling market growth. With our advanced AV features, and years of reliable hard drive design and OEM integration experience, we continue to work closely with large global manufacturers who are selling a new generation of TVs with integrated hard drives.”

Both the CinemaStar 7K1000.C and CinemaStar 5K1000 series are expected to start shipping in volume in Q4.

Currently owning, and being very happy with a few Hitachi models, and having experience with them back to the time when they were marketed in the U.S. as IBM, I can say they are very, very reliable, and though they tend to run hot, these variable rate drives should remove that problem for the small confines of the DVR. However, I do wonder why no 2TB model is being announced, which would compete with the similarly sized model from WD.

Hitachi is rumored to be on the verge of new platter densities being released, so maybe they will make a really big splash with the announcement of a huge new drive size for the CinemaStar line.

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